The process started with a conversation with an employee and alumnus of my university at my career fair. It was a fun, very casual conversation. I enjoyed discussing my side projects and classes with him. The person I spoke with was down-to-earth and honest about his opinions of the company and his work, which was a refreshing change from someone trying to force-feed me "kool-aid." I was contacted about a week later regarding an on-campus interview.

The on-campus interview was, if I recall correctly, 20 to 30 minutes long. It included about 10 minutes of behavioral questions, all pretty standard:

• Team experience
• Personal projects
• A brief QA

Following that, we did one technical question. The one I received was fairly basic, and I communicated to the interviewer that I knew the answer immediately. He permitted me to write my solution in Pythonic pseudocode. We then discussed why it was the best solution, as well as other, less optimal, solutions to the problem. All in all, it was a good experience. The interviewer seemed interested in me and treated me like someone suited to interview for the company. I received an invitation to interview on-site the following week.

Scheduling my on-site interview was a bit of a pain, and from what I understand from my friends, they had similar experiences. The communication with the recruiting manager was great, but due to how responsibilities are tossed around at Microsoft, it took a long time for my flight and other arrangements to be confirmed. Even when I was told I would receive information about them, I never did. If you aren't paranoid like I am, this isn't a big deal.

Let's say you have a distributed system where you're running some task, such as a build process. Each machine in the system generates lines of output.

How would we approach creating a client-side application for viewing this unified log output?

Given two strings of Roman numerals, multiply their values. A Roman numeral is valid if it conforms to all of a series of rules. (I don't remember them, but that's not necessarily the purpose of the question).