There was a technical Skype interview, followed by a series of on-site interviews. These interviews were for an entry-level, full-time university position at the Oslo office in Norway.

The phone interview was straightforward, featuring a palindrome programming question, followed by general computer science topics (complexity, memory, etc.) and some specific questions regarding my area of expertise.

Within a couple of days, I received an email with details on how to book a flight for the on-site interview.

The on-site interview was more thorough. Each candidate underwent 3-4 interviews in a row, rotating interviewers every 45 minutes with a 5-minute break in between. Each interviewer started with general, open-ended questions, not necessarily related to programming. I was told the interview process had recently been changed across Microsoft, and these open-ended questions were used to gauge how candidates think. The first two interviewers then asked programming-related questions (e.g., write a linked list in C, how do memory and resource management differ in C versus garbage-collected languages), along with some discussion. Note that we were asked to program on a whiteboard.

The third interview presented a different and unexpected question: how to build a library (not the programming variant) that can support millions of users. I was asked to consider factors like how to organize books and how tall shelves should be.

Also, each interview ended by asking if I had any questions, so it would be wise not to ask every question to the first interviewer.

Write a program that checks if a string is a palindrome. What's its complexity?

Write a simple singly-linked list in C.

How does memory and resource management differ from C++ to a garbage-collected language such as Python?

How would you build/design a library (not the programming type) that can handle a million users, containing every book from 1970 and which will also support books 30 years in the future from now?