My first interview was a 30 minute on-campus screen: one puzzle question and a few short, general CS questions. If you know anything at all, this is a piece of cake. The remainder of this review describes my on-site experience. Regarding travel arrangements: I experienced a flight cancellation for my return journey, but the travel team was very supportive and helpful, extending my hotel stay and rebooking my flight. Regarding the interviews: most of the advice and information available here and elsewhere online is quite accurate (just note that they generally do NOT ask “mount Fuji” questions anymore), and as there is a lot of it (if you are unable or too lazy to find it you certainly do not deserve an offer from any company) I will only give a brief outline of my experience. I arrived at the recruiting building in my rental car and managed to find a single open parking spot. After checking in at the desk, I had about 15 minutes to hang out in the lobby area with around 12 other candidates. They provide free drinks, xbox, and some weird machines running a program called something like “tell us about yourself,” which I tried to use unsuccessfully. The recruiter took me to an office where we spent about 15 minutes going over the day, some interview advice, and a little about my goals and background; nothing technical or difficult. The first 30 minutes of my first “real” interview consisted of discussing his and my background and me asking lots of questions about the product since I had never heard of it. The remaining 30 minutes were filled by a problem on sorting: design, complexity, and pseudocode. He had a somewhat similar background so we had no trouble connecting. Next was my lunch interview at a nearby cafeteria. There was a wide selection of reasonably priced food (though I had a voucher for a free lunch). I decided on a salad for ease of eating. We talked about the company, the team and my goals. Back in his office, I worked out two problems on trees coded up in C++. The next interview was entirely coding; two of the questions were easy but the third gave me trouble; it was the craziest recursion I’ve ever seen. Make sure you practice with trees a lot, and don’t bother much with general graphs. The interviewer gave me lots of tips, and I finished the code at the last minute. The fourth interview was more like the earlier ones; relatively informal conversation in the first half followed by a technical question, in this case design. I had to design a data structure to represent the state of a game. Pretty open ended… I think the idea is just to have a dialog about design tradeoffs (memory vs. speed and so on). Finally I was happy to make it to the last interview with an upper level person which involved more discussion of the team and my past experiences—no technical questions. Be sure to have something to say about every item on your resume—difficulties you encountered, what you learned, etc. I briefly met the recruiter again and went back to the hotel. In a few days, I heard the good news from the recruiter. So my advice is: 1) ask questions, be curious, and be enthusiastic about the team/product and the company. If you are having a “conversation“ and not just a dry Q&A, then you are probably doing this well. 2) spend a few minutes verbalizing your ideas before writing any code. 3) don’t code silently. 4) practice coding on paper or a whiteboard before the interview--preferably with someone watching over your shoulder. It really helps! 5) try to learn something from each interview, anything, then use it in a later interview; ESPECIALLY if the interviewer specifically gives you advice. They want you to succeed. Remember this if you get nervous. This is mostly drawn from advice I’ve heard elsewhere, but I found it to be particularly useful. Good Luck! Also, everyone I encountered at Microsoft was very nice and personable. The interviews felt mostly relaxed and enjoyable.