Microsoft visited our campus and shortlisted candidates based on their submitted resumes. They conducted brief, face-to-face interviews (approximately 30 minutes each) on campus over two days.

I was asked about my educational background, my thesis, research, and open-ended questions such as:

• Give a few examples of scenarios where distributed computing could be applied and would be useful.
• Tell me about a time when you were faced with a difficult problem you couldn't solve.
• Why is finding a bug in multiprocessor programming harder than in sequential programming? How would you solve this problem?

Subsequently, they flew me to Redmond for a full day of one-on-one interviews (five in total: four technical and one HR). They covered accommodation, travel, and other expenses, making me feel very comfortable.

The people were very nice and friendly.

Write a function to add content to an XML file at an appropriate place every time a certain type of HTTP request is made. Since the server is serving multiple HTTP requests in parallel using threads, the solution should account for that.

Implement a Tic Tac Toe game to be played between a user and a computer.

N people are sitting in a circle, labelled 1 through N. They begin counting 1, 2, 3, ... in a clockwise manner, and every person who gets a number divisible by 3 is eliminated. Write a program to figure out which numbered person will remain. What are the time and space complexities?

Questions on object-oriented programming concepts such as polymorphism, multiple inheritance, and virtual functions.

Model the animals in a zoo and draw the class diagrams. Questions regarding when it's appropriate to inherit from a class as opposed to adding a property in the current class, and so on. When to use multiple inheritance, which classes should be abstract, etc.

Implement a solution to the shortest path problem in a weighted directed graph. (Obviously, the question wasn't framed like this; they gave me a map of cities with distances and asked how to get from city A to city B with the smallest distance traveled, and then to write code for it.)