We were lucky enough to stumble upon this post regarding one lucky fellow who not only interned at Yahoo and Google, but also got shipped off to Microsoft - twice!

For a summary of his experiences, please see this chart:

For a brief (quoted) explanation of how he knows this, please read-on…

"One day, one of my friends, who is now at Microsoft Research, mentioned that Microsoft was looking for a new Student Consultant for next year. His friend was the current SC and his only job seemed to be giving away xboxes and software, so I thought, hey I want to do that. We set up a dinner for the three of us where Microsoft picked up the tab, and the SC said “Hey, I’ll refer you to my boss. You’ll do some interviews, okay?” That segued into me being Microsoft representative at our campus the following year. The job gave me unlimited freedom to do whatever I wanted to promote Microsoft on campus, and great money to top it off. This included giving away xboxes, pocket pcs, software, and other toys to students and professors for their projects.

Being the SC connected me to our campus Microsoft recruiter, and I was flown to Microsoft headquarters in Redmond for a day of interviews. I met with the Web Platform team and people working on the next next next version of Visual Studio. I had been booked for a full day of interviews, walking from office to office. Most of the day, I had thought I did well, but the last interviewer stumped me with a question about malloc() and free(). How do you store the information about which memory locations were available and which were not? I gave what I thought was an acceptable solution but it seems like the interviewer always has a better answer in mind. Luckily, I still ended up with an offer to be a software engineer intern for Microsoft Project which I accepted.

Being an intern here was a blast and I was among good company with around 500 interns in Redmond. One memorable intern event was a barbeque at Bill Gate’s mansion by the bay. It was quite a palace and I couldn’t even see the entire house because it was 90% covered in trees. We munched on h’orderves and chatted with VPs while waiting for the BillG to come out. He finally made an entrance near the end of the evening and was immediately surrounded by interns shaking his hand and asking press questions like “How does Microsoft plan to position itself in the future?” During his informal talk, I was about 2 feet behind him and I wasn’t paying much attention to the speech but only noticed his shoes — they were actually slightly worn out normal looking shoes. I had always wondered what the richest man in the world wore and did not expect that.

I got a call next April from Google asking if I wanted to do some phone interviews for a summer internship. There were two 30-minute phone interviews with one engineer who would turn out to be my mentor, and one who would be a co-worker. I was pretty nervous during the phone interview, but was asked great questions rather than riddles or short programming problems.

The rumors about Google were mostly true: free gourmet food (breakfast, lunch, and dinner) and kitchens with cereal and snacks nearby. The chefs would chat with you while you were filling your plate and answer any questions about the ingredients or cooking methods. Googlers are picky — I remember a > 100 email thread on the Mountain View misc mailing list discussing conspiracy theories about why our biodegradable recycled take-away food containers were replaced by cardboard ones. The variety of drinks was my favorite thing: you could get fresh squeezed juices of all kinds or whatever soft drink or tea you preferred.

I chose to work at Yahoo when I finally graduated. A few months ago, Yahoo was almost the last of the 3 search engine companies I thought I would be working at. I started out on my path to working at Yahoo at the college career fair. After the quick and painless pre-screening at the booth, I was invited to an interview at our computer science building in the afternoon the next day. I arrived with my pen and extra copy of Resume and sat in the conference room for about half an hour. Unfortunately, my interviewer, Kevin didn’t show up. I got stood up for an interview! Granted, this was the first time Yahoo has come to our school to recruit, but it was still frustrating. Even more frustrating was that my numerous emails to the college recruiter went unanswered. I also had a few friends at Yahoo that I contacted but no luck. A few weeks later, I had been asked to fly out for a few days of interviews in the Bay Area / Silicon Valley with a bunch of other companies and had a free day. It just so happened that one of my friends who interned with me at Microsoft, won the Yahoo Hackday competition and met a Yahoo employee that got me in touch with a few hiring managers. I went to the Yahoo offices in Sunnyvale and did a full day and a half of interviews, and ended up where I am now — a software engineer in SDS, the data mining group in the company.