I applied to the job on the homepage of MS. There was a phone interview some 20 days after application. I was asked: Why MS? What does my recent studies and working for such a company has in common? What programming experience I have? What is my minimum expected salary? What is the nearest date at which I could start my job? Do I want to make a PhD? There was only a phone interview yet, some questions were in my mother tongue (Hungarian), others were in English. Technical phone interview: I had one example: 1. You have two columns of random numbers. What is the correlation between them? A: 0 2. How would you create a third column that is correlated to the first? A: sum up the first two columns. 3. What will be the correlation between the first and third column given the first two columns have zero average and 1 is the standard deviation? A: Use the formulas listed here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correlation_and_dependence I think I should have asked for more details at the separate questions as the interviewer was a Hungarian and didn't formulate some key features comprehensibly. It wasn't always clear what he wanted to ask.