I was contacted by a Microsoft recruiter who found a team for me to interview. (By the way, they gave me one of the worst customer experiences; the response time for each email was a minimum of 3 days!)

I was not aware of a Microsoft policy, which I learned from my recruiter, that interviews are not scheduled more than 14 days in advance. So, 14 days before I wanted to schedule an interview, I contacted the recruiter. After being assured that my interview was scheduled, I applied for a brief break from work. The interview did not happen when I had taken a leave of absence (time off wasted!). I feel that having a good recruiter to work with is important at Microsoft.

There was a 45-minute phone screen.

There were five on-site interviews: four technical and one with the hiring manager.

I did not receive an offer because the hiring manager stated I had a lot of UI experience, and the team had another candidate with more backend experience. The hiring manager requested the recruiter to help me find another position, but I did not pursue it, as the recruiter was a pain to work with.

Graph coloring

There is a pixel map with 1's representing land and 0 representing water. Find the number of continents (connected groups of 1's).

Convert integers to Roman numerals.

Write a function to return a list of files (recursively) given the root directory Node.

How will you design a many-to-many relational database?

What are the considerations you have when creating a web service?

How would you do load balancing?