I applied through a recruiter. The process took 4 weeks. I interviewed at Microsoft (Seattle, WA) in Nov 2015
Interview
I gave my resume to a recruiter at my school's career fair. Got an email back and had a 30 minute interview at my school's career center. In the interview, we mostly just talked about interests and general questions about data structures. The coding problem was to implement a linked list. I passed that interview and was flown out to Seattle for final round interviews. They pay for everything they can and then reimburse you for everything else, including food and a small stipend for site seeing, so the trip was great. The day of the interview everyone showed up at 7:30am for a quick breakfast (fruit, rolls, bagels, etc) in a common area. There were about 40 other candidates being interviewed during that time. About 60% female, 40% male. And about 60% Indian, 25% Asian, and 15% Caucasian. Then we each had four 45 minutes interviews, with 15 minute breaks between each one. Two of the interviewers are from one team in Microsoft and the other two are from another team. They make hiring decisions independent of one another so you could theoretically get offers from both teams (or none). Of the four of us interview candidates from my university, we all seemed to be interview by entirely different teams. (How they determined what teams you would be interviewing with was somewhat of a mystery to us.) Unfortunately for me, both the teams I interviewed with were in charge of back-end development. And I let both of them know that I had zero desire for that. Front-end all the way. After the interviews, we were taken over to another building on their campus for lunch. Lots of places to choose from and the campus is really nice. Overall, I think the best part was staying in the fancy hotel and going to the space needle and big Ferris wheel but I guess those parts are very aside from the actual objective of it all.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Write an implementation of a linked with functions for inserting and deleting at specified indexes.
The interview was a long process. There was first the recruiter screen, which was followed by a 4-loop interview structure that covered technical, behavioral, and system design. The interviewers were very kind and accommodating.
I applied online. The process took 3 weeks. I interviewed at Microsoft
Interview
After my application to ClipChamp - Microsoft, a recruiter reached out and scheduled my first interview. It was about basic interview questions and background analysis. After that I had my technical interview. The recruiter specifically said that I would be facing medium hacker rank questions. So I prepared accordingly. However, what I actually got was to analyse an application and re work it according to new requirements. I felt like I was set up for failure on purpose. Didn’t even hear back after that interview.
Took a bit longer than I thought, spanning about three weeks from start to finish. After a quick recruiter screen, I had a technical round where I was asked about validating a binary search tree. The wild part is, I had literally seen this exact problem on prachub.com while prepping. It helped me feel more confident discussing my approach and edge cases. There was also a behavioral interview where I shared my experiences, and eventually, I received an offer. I chose to decline it, though, as it wasn't the right fit for me at the time.