I applied through a recruiter. The process took 1 day. I interviewed at Microsoft in Dec 2011
Interview
Just had the phone interview so no idea on the outcome yet.
The interviewer was very friendly and knowledgeable and offered plenty of opportunities to ask questions about the company, the position and so on. We then talked about my resume and what projects I'd worked on. He asked me about my most technically challenging project and the various issues I encountered as well as how I solved them in detail.
He then asked a brain teaser / algorithm type question which took a little coaching for me to get right. I'd revised quite hard on data structures and algorithms but found myself rather unprepared for the question.
I didn't get the perfect answer but made sure to keep talking and offering up suggestions. This led to me being asked other questions which I could answer easily. Overall, it was a friendly interview but I'm 50/50 on if I'll get a call back.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
You have 16 race horses and a racetrack which only fits 4 horses at one time. Find the top 4 horses in the fewest number of races.
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.