I sent in applications for SDE, SDET, and IT positions in October. Near the end of January, a recruiter called to schedule a phone interview. This was a 30-minute interview with an engineer from the team. They asked basic questions:

• How do you troubleshoot your home network?
• How would you describe virtualization to your grandmother?
• Questions about projects on my resume.

The following week, I was selected for an on-site interview. It was an all-expenses-paid trip to Redmond, including flights, a three-day, two-night stay in a nice hotel, a rental car, and fancy meals.

The on-site interview involved four engineers from the same team. Each interview lasted 45 minutes. Most of these were simple conversations. If you make it to this round, it's basically a culture fit. They didn't ask any coding questions or "How many golf balls fit in a school bus" type questions. The whole team was really good. Less than a week later, the recruiter contacted me with an offer. They're looking for people who love what they do and are eager to learn and grow independently. It's the entire culture they support up there.

Design a service to automate the interaction between locked and encrypted Nokia Phones and Microsoft.