I submitted my resume to an on-campus recruiter and received an email that same evening. The recruiter wanted to chat on the phone two days later, which was a quick discussion of my background and interests. At the end of the call, I was invited to attend a half-day of on-site interviews just three days later (after the weekend).

The on-site interviews consisted of four separate 45-minute one-on-one interviews with four different Microsoft developers. They asked typical technical design and algorithms questions, and also wanted to spend a lot of time hearing me talk about a project I had worked on in the past. The first interview was very straightforward, but they became progressively more difficult. In later interviews, they specifically asked about topics that your resume indicated you had no experience with, to see how you handle unknown situations.

Results were given on the spot by HR, so less than five days after first getting in touch with Microsoft, a job offer was on the table. Overall, an extremely efficient interview process. They are clearly pushing to hire early before top grads get snapped up by their competitors.

How would you design an automated test system for the clock application on a mobile smartphone?

How would you implement a 'bag' data structure with push() and pop() operations that scales well on a massively parallel system? (Imagine you are implementing malloc on a multiprocessor OS)