I applied online. The process took 3 months. I interviewed at Microsoft (Redmond, WA) in Dec 2013
Interview
I was first interviewed at my university campus in Europe. It was a 45 min interview with standard questions about programming languages and problem solving.
About two-three months after that I traveled to Redmond, WA for the second round of the interviews. There were 6 interviews, started at 10am finished at 5:30pm with a very short break every hour.
All interviewers were nice and friendly.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Standard coding and design questions. Some questions about my background.
A tedious question was to convert a string representing a roman number to an integer. This question is not hard to solve, but tedious to code.
I applied online. The process took 3 weeks. I interviewed at Microsoft (Redmond, WA) in Oct 2013
Interview
The process started off with my campus recruiter re-sending an email about a potential phone interview. Turns out the first email was sent straight to spam (bad Google! Folks, check your spam folder every now and then). I replied, and she set up a phone interview for me a few weeks later.
Phone interview: Morning phone call with some pretty standard questions. The msft employee was fairly nice and wanted me to code the questions (can't remember but I'd guess they were string searches and character counting programs) and send them to his microsoft.com email address. A few days later I got an email from my campus recruiter saying I did well, and she'd like to know some teams that I might be interested in interviewing with.
Redmond: On the morning of the interview I met with my recruiter at the recruiting building 111 where she handed me details of my first interview and what team I was interviewing for. What followed was the standard microsoft interview loop (meet with a person, interview for an hour, then be asked to wait in the coffee lounge while the interviewer goes to talk to the next person). After meeting three people, I was asked to meet their manager, and after that, his manager!
A few days later I got an email saying that they would like to move ahead with an offer!
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Nothing really out of the ordinary. If you practice with cracking the coding interview and similar books (practice with, mind you, not learn from) you should be golden.