I applied through college or university. The process took 1 day. I interviewed at Microsoft in Nov 2014
Interview
Had an on campus interview with a Senior Engineer at Microsoft. I first asked to tell them about myself. Then, the interviewer asked some questions about my resume experience, including what my biggest challenges were and where I would go to find solutions to problems that came up during the development process.
I was asked two technical questions. The first was to write a program to find the maximum height of a tree. The second was to write a program to print a tree in reverse order (i.e. the opposite of in-order traversal)
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
The reverse in-order traversal stumped me slightly; my solution was to do an in-order traversal, adding elements to a FIFO stack. Then after the traversal, pop off the elements of the stack.
I was contacted by a campus recruiter to do an on campus interview. The interview was very non-technical and afterwards I was invited to interview on-site for an SDET position. They flew me out and paid for food and housing, then I spent a day interviewing. The interviews themselves were fine, not terribly difficult, but I wasn't set out to be a SDET so I didn't prepare and showed that in the testing specific interviews.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Lots of "is this ready to ship to the world" questions, can't remember specifics.
I applied through an employee referral. The process took 2 days. I interviewed at Microsoft in Dec 2011
Interview
There were two steps for the interview: first of all I got a phone screening check from HR, I was asked me about my professional background, my education, work and personal achievements. After that there was a phone test: small check on how to test a login form with two edit-boxess (login and password) and a submit button. The task was to create test cases and explain them, estimate coverage and create a test report. After I passed those two I got an on site interview invitation. In person interview was with three people one at a time: project development team lead and the head of engineering (site leader) and HR representative. I got a couple of simple questions from development team lead: reverse a string, reverse a linked list and find all elements from hash table with specific value. With site leader there were some questions about my knowledge of software development life cycle and agile development, after that we had an informal conversation on my personal views on software quality assurance, team work and overall personal goals. There was a small delay when guys were discussing the interview, after that as I got my offer right away. I've negotiated a little on salary, asked about bonuses provided by company and finally accepted the offer.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
The most unexpected question was about how I would spread the work between my team mates and myself.