I applied through college or university. The process took 1 day. I interviewed at Microsoft (Redmond, WA) in Jan 2009
Interview
Well, first of all I attended a job fair at my college, Arizona State University, where I handed my resume to Microsoft. I was then called in to the school career center for my first interview. I was so nervous but I was able to answer the questions I was asked even though I didn't finish writing the code, he saw my thought process and he agreed that given the time, I could code the solution.
A few weeks later, I received an email to set a date for an in-person interview. I arrived in Seattle and went for my interview the next day. On getting to Microsoft, I met some other candidates who were also interviewing that day. We all were in the receiving area playing with the surface, xbox guitar hero and some other games. I had applied for an internship but asked them right there to change it to a job and I was told that I might not get the best fit. Thinking back, I guess I should have stuck with the internship.
I met with three people on that day, all about an hour each except the third which was about an hour and half because of the lunch. I was asked some tough questions and I was able to answer some really well, and others not so well. Overall, it was a good interviewing experience but I was so drained at the end of the day.
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.