I applied through university. The process took 3 months. I interviewed at Microsoft (Redmond, WA) in Dec 2014
Interview
I am a mechanical engineer by training with past programming experience for primarily personal projects (video games and such) in multiple languages. I'm currently in a PhD program finishing up the masters portion. I casually chatted with a recruiter at a university career fair who told me that he will pass on my resume and that there "may" be something for me at Microsoft but he doesn't know what. He told me to contact the university recruiter in a few days and she might be able to help me better. They called me for a screening interview for an internship the day after.
I'm not - what I like to call - "classically trained" when it comes to computer science. I prepared for the screening interview by going through the MIT OCW Algorithms and Data Structures course and also reading Miller and Ranum's "Problem Solving with Algorithms and Data Structures." The screening interview went better than expected. Among other things, I was asked to design a parking lot and write code for detecting palindromes.
A few weeks later I got a call for a final round interview. It took a while for them to schedule an interview and they gave me a date which was 3 days after a major deadline with my sponsor and so I requested a later date. The scheduler worked with my availability and got me a date that worked. They flew me to Redmond for an interview with the Bing team (I wasn't given that information until the morning of the interview). I was supposed to get 3 to 5 interviews. My first interviewer was late because he missed an email sent by the receptionist. Everything after that went smoothly. I got through all 5 interviews. The third interview was over lunch (we wrote code after, not during). The fifth interview was with a program manager. The questions seemed relatively easy. The topics were: queue design, common ancestor search in a tree with no underlying structure, mixed uni and multi byte character strings, detection of unique addresses, and linked list scanning and element removal. Some interviewers wanted me to just solve a problem as well as I could. Others were looking for a discussion of the problem (one of which was actually very interesting and have the interviewer some new ideas).
At the very end I asked the hiring manager some subtle questions about my performance and what kind of competition I was facing. It's nice to be told that there is a "high probability" of them making an offer :)
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Suppose you have a string which has characters that are either one or two bytes long. A one byte character has 0 as the left most bit. The first byte of a two byte character has 1 as the left most bit but the second byte's left most bit (LMB) could be either 1 or 0. Implement an algorithm for removing 1 character from the end of the string. How would you do it while scanning backwards from the end of the string.
Followup: What if you needed to do this repeatedly? Is there some way you could reduce the time complexity to constant?
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.
