Although I did not receive a job offer, the overall experience was positive. Now, I need to debunk a myth. They say that if you get five interviews and the last one is with a senior manager, you're guaranteed a job. NOPE. NEVER. I had five interviews, and the last one was with a very pleasant senior individual who had been with the company for 35 years, and I was still rejected.

I went to Redmond a few months ago on a snowy winter day. There were five interviews:

1. A very strict (but polite) interviewer, who was not smiling and explicitly stated they would not offer help or hints. The focus was on quickly writing bug-free C++ code to find a pattern in a string, implementing post-order tree traversal both recursively and iteratively, and a few research/design problems.

2. An extremely pleasant Korean gentleman who asked about hash tables, including lookup, insertion, collision handling, and C++ implementation. There was also a question about generating all permutations of a given string.

3. Lunch interview: A very kind and helpful interviewer. They asked me to develop an algorithm to determine if a matrix possesses certain properties. It was five months ago, so I've forgotten the exact question. I could solve it, but they were looking for a more efficient algorithm. The interviewer offered hints, but time ran out, and they passed me to the next interviewer, mentioning I was on the right track.

4. The fourth interviewer was very odd. I hope their behavior was intentional and not their usual demeanor. From our conversation, it was clear they were highly intelligent. They wrote a long input string with numerous delimiters on the whiteboard and asked me to write C code to transform it into another format based on specific rules. It was a horribly vague and convoluted question with many unknowns and exceptions. During the interview, the interviewer periodically appeared to be dozing off and left the room at least three times. Again, I hope this was a test of my reaction. My hope stems from the fact that at the end of the interview, this person was the only one who provided very honest feedback and compliments. However, if this was not a test, their behavior was extremely rude. They then passed me on to the final interviewer.

5. A senior manager who had worked at Microsoft for 35 years. They were very cool, smart, and fun, which was easily discernible from the flags and decorations in the room, and perhaps some wine on the table! Incidentally, I did not have any behavioral questions at any other point during the day. This interviewer simply started chatting with me, which I assume was the behavioral component of the interview. We discussed everything except work, touching upon big corporations, hacking, and so on. It was truly an amazing experience with that individual.

Based on the book, I felt confident I would get the job, but... one week later, I was rejected.

Given a long input string with lots of delimiters on the whiteboard, I was asked to write C code to change the given string to another format based on some rules. It was a horribly vague, twisted question with lots of unknowns and exceptions.