I applied through an employee referral. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Microsoft in Aug 2014
Interview
The recruiter had a quick chat with me before arranging for a technical interview for evaluating my problem solving/algorithms/programming skills. The technical interview was conducted over phone and collabedit. I was given a programming problem (to be solved in the language of my choice). I used JavaScript to write the solution. The interviewer pointed out the need for optimization and gave some hints. I quickly figured out a fairly optimized code.
The interviewer didn't sound too impressed with my performance. As the problem was fairly simple, he probably expected me to write a perfectly optimized code on the first shot. In my opinion, I exhibited the ability to discuss and think through solutions, rather than being well-versed in solving a certain class of problems.
There is no telling what works.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Nothing unexpected or particularly difficult. What is really hard is that the transparency is one way. You give your answers and you will never get to know what the interviewer was expecting to hear.
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.