Phone interview about general work history led to in person meeting. Question asked: In a given string find the last unique character. My answer was to filter out special cases (empty string, null string, blank string, single character string...) Some of this required firming up requirements (e.g. What do you return with a null string?) Interviewer's eyes rolled when I asked this and I was told to not worry about it, just code the answer. The actual coding was to be done on a whiteboard. My solution was to start from the end of the string and loop backwards. For each character compare the first index position against the last index position of the same character. If first and last index positions were the same the character was unique. Since I started from the end of the string the first time this happened was the last unique character. When that happened you dropped out of the loop and returned the answer. I was told that this was wrong. The way to do it was to run through the loop and hash the characters and keep track of the current last hash created. When you finished the loop the last hash created was the last unique character. We talked about the big O values of each method Overall the interview was difficult. The interviewer gave the impression their time was being wasted right from the start.

This was a contract position at Microsoft Hardware Software Team. I got contacted through a staffing agency that I worked with. First - I got some screening questions like these: 1. Create a class Shape and two derived classes Rectangle and Triangle. All of them implement method called edgeCount(). 2. Suppose you have a C++ base class and several classes that inherit from it. What might happen if you do not write a virtual destructor for the base class? 3. Provide a *robust* function that will accept an array of integers and the length of the array, find the two largest even integers in the array, multiply them together, and return the result. Then they invited me for a series of 3 1:1 interviews at their location asking typical Microsoft interview questions, like - find duplicate items in unsorted lists plus some SQL questions like - how to list all addresses for all customers and how joins work between tables. For the skills - it is just best to know them and refresh some knowledge - scan through a book on the subject and review anything you might not know or always thought difficult in a particular area (like types of locks and locking levels in SQL). For algorithms - it would be a good idea to browse through computational complexity information for common data structures and algorithms (hashtables, binary trees) and try out some common questions (see http://www.careercup.com/). Also - be confident and show your real interest in the job - I might have shown I was not so much interested in that position, since I was looking for something a bit different. Now I am still looking and wondering whether I should have shown more enthusiasm for their work.