I applied through a recruiter. The process took 2 days. I interviewed at Microsoft (Redmond, WA) in Sept 2017
Interview
The process was very scatterbrained and poorly run. The group didn't have a clear leader and their criteria of what they were looking for in an engineer shifted with every interviewer. The interview included a really awkward development test sat in front of Visual Studio coding an example solution, but there were a variety of setup problems as well as an incomplete specification of the problem that made the process slow and overcomplicated.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
The racehorse problem: given 25 horses and no stopwatch, and you can only race 5 horses at the same time, how few races does it take to find the fastest horse?
Started with a recruiter phone call and a 30 minute phone call with the hiring manager to negotiate a remote role since the job was based in Seattle and the manager agreed. Following up with five rounds of virtual on site. Four of them are coding/design. One of them is behavioral mostly leetcode medium level questions which I finished and I was able to do all the follow up and answer the design and time complexity questions correctly after the interview got ghosted for a whole month and got an automatic rejection email.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Leet code medium level questions. DFS, BFS, sliding windows and greedy algorithm. Follow up, asking some design questions and the time complexity of the code.
Phone interview with hiring manager for 45 minutes primarily a tech interview. Focused on questions directly related to tech stack. Come prepared knowing design questions and how those conversations go.