The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Microsoft (Seattle, WA) in Oct 2008
Interview
As a college student, Microsoft first came to my Campus to give me an interview, where they asked me a challenging programming logic question. I passed that interview, and they flew me to Seattle for an on-site interview. Over the course of a day, I had 4 interviews that were much like my on campus interview. At each interview, I was asked a technical question. From what I heard, it seemed that only about one out of every four people who are flown to Seattle will receive an offer.
Interview questions [4]
Question 1
You have a list of red and blue objects. You have to sort them using swapping in order N time.
Given a set of people, one of them is a celebrity. You have a 2D array which describes which people know each other, that is [N, M] is true if N knows M. The celebrity will not know anyone (except them self) and everyone will know the celebrity. Find an order N algorithm to find the celebrity.
You have list of numbers that are sorted but shifted. That is, a list like [5, 6, 1, 2, 3] or [15, 17, 20, 25, 2, 8] is given. Find the most efficient way to search for a number in this type of list.