I applied through an employee referral. The process took 3 weeks. I interviewed at Microsoft (Redmond, WA) in Apr 2017
Interview
I got referred to a specific team at Microsoft as New Grad hiring was halted for 2016. Talked to a manager on the phone for an hour, and was asked about my resume and did a interview question. Was flown to Seattle 2 weeks later and had an onsite interview with the team at Redmond. It consisted of 5 interviews with coding and culture-fit questions. I was at the Microsoft Campus from 9AM to 4:30PM. The process was nice, and the interviews were more conversational than say Google onsite interviews. I got a call 2 days later with an offer to join the team.
Microsoft enjoyed asking data structure questions with arrays, linked lists, strings, etc. Questions on graphs are said to be rare. Be prepared to answer any design questions, which may be follow up questions to coding questions.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Questions on string traversal, arrays + math were common in my interview.
It started with a 90-minute online assessment, followed by a technical phone screen with one engineer. The OA covered two medium-to-hard algorithm problems. For coding practice, I mainly rely on "LeetCode" to cover different topics. For company-specific interview preparation, I use "Hack2Hire", "LeetCode Discuss", and "1Point3Acres" to find any recent original questions. All of them are helpful platforms. The phone screen included one coding problem and some discussion around edge cases and time complexity.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Given a list of meeting time intervals, determine if a person could attend all meetings.
I applied online. The process took 1 week. I interviewed at Microsoft in Dec 2024
Interview
I was invited to a technical interview with Microsoft. The interviewer started with a general question: “What happens when you type google.com into your browser?” They asked a few follow-up questions related to that.
After that, they gave me a LeetCode algorithmic question, which was at a hard level. The problem was “Integer to English Words.”
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
1. What happens when you type google.com into your browser?
2. “Integer to English Words” – LeetCode algorithmic question
Three tech interviews + one hiring manager VO, most of questions are medium to hard leetcode questions. Ask some questions about techniques you written on the resume. But I think they care more about the match of the research and the job.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Tell me about the recommendation System you made for the work.