While I can't speak for all Microsoft interviews, I will say that I was pleasantly surprised to find that my (successful) Redmond interview had zero focus on tr

While I can't speak for all Microsoft interviews, I will say that I was pleasantly surprised to find that my (successful) Redmond interview had zero focus on traditional "coding interview" questions and instead was 50% about my prior work and the rest about some interesting software dev questions focused on design (not whiteboarding, not algorithmy), culminating in this lovely networkingy question. This is true for the MS interviews of some acquaintances of mine too. OTOH I have yet to find someone who has had a Google interview that did not have major focus on algorithmy questions which you can just memorize for. To be fair, most of the folks I know are students; Google may have different tactics for more experienced candidates. I'm sure Microsoft does this too (and I know that Microsoft is where this attitude came from in the first place), but it seems like it does it much less (from my limited anecdotal view) these days.