I applied through a recruiter. The process took 5 days. I interviewed at Microsoft (Research Triangle Park, NC) in Feb 2015
Interview
It was an entire day meeting with managers from a variety of teams. The interview was quite grueling, but fair. They are extremely focused on ensuring that they hire top talent, so they understandably want to be thorough about it. Be prepared to do a LOT of whiteboard coding. You need to be able to explain performance characteristics, code testability, feasibility of algorithms in a production environment, etc.
There will be quite a lot of conversation about CS fundamentals, data structures, and algorithms. Strongly recommend pulling out some college textbooks or going through some interview preparation material if you don't feel confident about these things. Some of the problems are designed to be almost impossible to solve in the time provided - they are more interested in seeing your thought process, so don't get too frustrated during the process.
Interview questions [3]
Question 1
Implement a queue in any language backed by an array. Explain how to test.
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.
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