The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Microsoft in Oct 2011
Interview
Resume sent through career fair in school. I was sent information to sign up for a phone interview slot. The phone interview lasted for about one hour asking me for some background information and my past coding experience (what is the longest program you've written). As I was also interviewing for the google APM position, they asked my organizational skills as well.
I applied through college or university. The process took 2 months. I interviewed at Microsoft (Seattle, WA) in Jan 2012
Interview
Met with the collage recruiter in career fair. Then had a 1.1 interview on the campus. After a few weeks on-site is offered. Then it is rescheduled for the next month. On site consisted of 5 1.1 interviews. First you meet with your recruiter chat about your hobbies or your plans for your career. Then, she directs you to the first interviewer. Each interviewer escorts you to the next one. The third one is most of the time lunch interviewer. During the lunch he may ask about your projects or some technology related questions. Then, I had two more interviews. The forth one was with a lead dev and the last one was with a manager. Don't think that you will get the job if you made to the manager. At least that's not happened in my case. I got the nearly all the questions right during the day. Asked a lot of questions about company, technologies they are using or about the products. However, in the end since a lot of people are applying they have the chance to very picky. Overall, everything was really smooth and professional. Probably I'll apply again in the future. Good luck to all of you.
Interview questions [5]
Question 1
How to shuffle a deck of card? (collage interview)
In order traversal of binary tree? What if we have a limit on the depth of the recursive calls, how can you let user know that tree is so deep that traversal failed? (3rd)
Given a string "1800RENTCAR" can have spaces in any where, output the "1 800 7368-227" Can't use any additional memory for mapping chars to intergers. You need a math formula to convert them. The output must be exactly the same as the example. (4th)
Given HTML file <foo> encode it as <foo>. Improve complexity from O(n) to O(logn) to constant time (5th interview)
I applied online. The process took 4 weeks. I interviewed at Microsoft (Seattle, WA) in Nov 2011
Interview
I had 1 phone interview which followed up by 5 interviews onsite. They were not very difficult, I was asked usual questions which include knowledge about data structures, sorting, recursion and some concurrency control. You are usually interviewed usually the same day with a bunch of other candidates (who are interviewed by the same team) which for me increased the stress.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
I can't reveal the questions since I was asked not to do it