I applied online. The process took 4 weeks. I interviewed at Microsoft (Dublin, Dublin) in May 2017
Interview
I applied online on the Microsoft Career website. I received an email a week after saying that they would like to plan a phone call. During this phone call we talked about my formation, my experience, what is this internship about, in which team, ... . Then after I received a mail saying that they were very impressed during the phone call and they would like to have on face to face interviews in Dublin.
I am from France so after a week were they organised the whole trip (flight, hotel, food, taxi, ... everything is paid for you, the hotel was a 4*!), I went to do face to face interviews.
I had one person who followed me the whole day, who was very cool and made me at ease. And then I did 4 interviews :
1st : We talked about my experience, project and the team
2nd : Technical questions on Data Science
3rd : Technical questions on software Dev, but also "if I say, money is not a problem what would be the job of your dream?"
4th : Technical questions on software Dev, but also "What is for you the difference between a Data Scientist and a software engineer?"
All the process was quite intense, I had only 5 minutes to drink a glass of water between each interview and all is going very quickly. But the interviewer were very cool, easy to talk with and we really managed to make a conversation more than an interview.
At the end they proposed me an offer directly!
Tips to suceed:
- Make it a 2 ways conversation rather than an 1 one interview. This means that you have to PREPARE questions to ask. Personally I had 5 question for each category (Technical Questions, Questions about working in Microsoft, Questions about life at microsoft).
- Be enthusiastic, dynamic and smiling
- Don't overthink technical interviews, they are pretty cool and can help you if you have some problems. If you have the minimum level required you can't fail it if you know how to build on their indications.
Interview questions [5]
Question 1
Data science : I had a graph showing different step were a client is interested by microsoft product to the real buying act. If you have a dataset of previous clients who bought/didn't buy, how to make prediction for new clients ?
SoftDev : Python (I chose), you have an array of string sorted but with empty strings (e.g. ["abc","","","","cef","","","dej,""] and you want to know if an other string is in this array. How to do it with a complexity of O(log n) in general case ?
Then how to find how many times it appears in this array ?
SoftDev : Python (I chose), You have an array of int of len n, sorted, filled with int from 0 to n, e.G. [0,1,2,4,5], you want to find what is the number such as it introduces the problem.
Complexity of O(log n) in general required.
I applied online. I interviewed at Microsoft (Haifa) in Apr 2017
Interview
After short telephone conversation, 90 minutes meeting in Microsoft with one data scientist.
After this interview I was sure I was very good in all questions. But I don't accepted.
I applied through a recruiter. The process took 2 days. I interviewed at Microsoft (Bengaluru) in Apr 2017
Interview
When HR contacted, it was for the Data Scientits position. When I appeared for the interview, they started testing on Data Engineering related skills. Even HR had no clue. I had to backout from the process. Poor Experience!