I began the interview process after meeting with a Microsoft recruiter at my university. Within a few days, I had a phone interview scheduled. I had two of these, and they were very easy. If you cannot make it past the phone interviews, either you didn't get anything out of school, or Microsoft doesn't want you.

I was then invited to fly up to Bellevue, WA, to interview for the Bing! team. I had to solve whiteboard problems in front of five different team members. I felt that some of the interviewers were somewhat disrespectful; one guy pulled out his laptop as I was solving and explaining a problem. I also had a lunch interview with some kind of manager that went pretty awkwardly. The guy didn't say much, and I didn't have much to tell him since he was pretty closed off. I thought I did well overall, except for an interview question where they asked me to implement a Sudoku solver.

Implement a Sudoku solver.

Implement an efficient string searching algorithm.