I applied through an employee referral. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Microsoft (Bellevue, WA) in July 2010
Interview
I attended for a two-day on-site interviews for two different groups. The first day interview went very well. The second day was okay (I did not get offer from this team, which is very obvous) The very first thing I want to mention about the microsoft interview process is that all the employees who interviewed me are very down to earth candidates. Almost at all times, they were either trying to help me or asking some plain questions.. there is no show off of their knowledge. I felt very relieved compared to my previous experience at other companies like Google, Amazon etc. All the interviewers are very friendly, they did not make any facial expressions or anything like that.. which made me feel that this is the place I should be working at.
During the on-site interviews the candidate is scheduled for a definite three 1:1 interviews, if the candidate is good enough then more interviews will be conducted and finally you will happen to meet the hiring manager. All the questions I was asked are data strucure related problem solving questions and simple test cases. Writing code on white board is bit tough for anyone, but practice makes you perfect. They are no longer asking any puzzles :).
Hacker Rank test and 3 Rounds of coding plus experience based interview.
Position was for QA who should have Storage and Networking knowledge. So basic questions on storage and networking.
I applied online. The process took 1 day. I interviewed at Microsoft (Redmond, WA) in Feb 2020
Interview
Full day process broken into multiple individual one on one interviews which can include time at the blackboard writing snippets of code or scripting. Not for the faint of heart or the unprepared.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Can you write a script to reverse the contents of an array?
I applied through university. The process took 3 weeks. I interviewed at Microsoft (Sydney) in Mar 2015
Interview
Applied through a university recruiter, and got to do an on-campus interview. The question was very easy (add an item to a sorted linked list) and I got to fly to Sydney for the next round. The second round consisted of 4 individual interviews with different people, with a range of difficulty for their interview questions.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Draw the system architecture of one of your projects