The process started at my university career fair where I gave out a resume. They gave me a t-shirt.

They got in touch a week later to schedule an on-campus interview at the university career services building. The interviewer asked one general thinking question (not coding) and one coding question. They also asked about my resume and research.

Three or four weeks later, I was contacted by an interview scheduler to set up an interview in Redmond. Due to the holiday season, I wasn't able to schedule the interview until a month later in January. The scheduler was not my recruiter and just was setting up the travel and timing. They flew me up and back and put me up in a hotel for 2 nights/3 days.

On their campus, I first met with my recruiter in their recruiting building, number 111. They informed me of which team I was interviewing with and stated that I should expect 4-5 hour-long interviews (with one extended to 90 minutes to include lunch).

In the recruiting building, while waiting to meet with a recruiter, you can:

• Play Xbox games
• Try out Windows Mobile products
• Speak with a concierge who can help with sightseeing in Seattle, nightlife, or transportation.

The interviews were each with someone from a different sub-team inside the group I interviewed with. Each person had me do a coding question, and some also asked algorithmic or conceptual questions (which didn't require explicit coding). Everything was on the whiteboard. I had 5 total interviews, and had time in 4 of them to ask questions of the interviewer about their team.

After the interviews, I met with the recruiter again and explained that I had immediate deadlines. They agreed to get in contact with the team and get back to me while I hung out in the lobby and relaxed. They came back and informed me that the team was very interested and would be making an offer.

The offer arrived the next day, with fairly standard compensation and bonus/stock. I ended up declining the offer.

Describe how you would count the words in this newspaper?

How would you search a database for a matching string, ignoring certain punctuation or special characters? What pre-processing would you do?

Determine the best move for a player in a probabilistic game, given the probabilities for each outcome of each player's move.