The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Microsoft in May 2011
Interview
Applied for a position within SQL Server group. Had two phone screen interviews with the test engineers. The questions are all technical, i.e. object oriented programming and SQL. Within two days I got invitation to a full-day on-site interviews starting from 8 AM to 5 PM including lunch interviews. Four interviews with engineers/architects and two with managers. Again typical programming interview questions, SQL, and database related questions, e.g. different types of join implementation.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Lowest common ancestor of two given nodes within a binary tree.
I applied through an employee referral. I interviewed at Microsoft in Feb 2012
Interview
Phone review (basic buzzwords: virtual functions, tcp vs udp), f2f interview with team lead: algorithm question and white board implemantion of math expression calculation, f2f interview with additional team lead: system design: how to design Google suggest, features, alg, arch, tests. F2f interview with manager: past projects, behavioral questions. HR interview
I applied through an employee referral. The process took 3 days. I interviewed at Microsoft (Hyderabad) in Jun 2013
Interview
Though i applied online to a position in Microsoft for more than a month, i only received the call from the recruiter a day after i got a reference. Now though i applied for a Program Manager position, the recruiter informed me that my profile suited another position: SDET 2 among the current openings.
I never did have any formal testing experience prior in my career but when the recruiter mentioned that development was the integral part of the profile.
My interview was with a Lead Tester whose questions were excellent analytical questions in Testing scenarios. He did not ask any typical technical questions (which otherwise can be googled). He was really testing my thinking on how i would test a product.
Interview questions [2]
Question 1
How will you manage multilingual (Hundreds of languages) testing of a Product in a very very short notice i.e. you cannot test all of them.
Prepare a detailed Test Plan Document: Resources required, Hardware required,Test Scenarios, Time required etc for "testing a Simple Web application form with 3 text fields and 2 numeric fields". He asked me to first ask him all the requirements as one would ask the client.