I applied through a recruiter. The process took 4 weeks. I interviewed at Microsoft (Bellevue, WA) in May 2008
Interview
Had an intial phone screen where I was just asked about my work experience and why I wanted to work at MS. Then I had an on-site interview where I met 5 different people and mostly I was asked some basic coding questions, like, how to reverse a string, find bugs in a code snippet and some behavioral questions.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
How to rotate strings in a multi-dimensional matrix.
I applied through college or university. The process took 3 weeks. I interviewed at Microsoft (Redmond, WA) in Mar 2008
Interview
This was a college campus interview process. Microsoft makes it a point to hire bigtime from colleges. They had a booth in career fair and I submitted my resume there. I was shortlisted for an interview in college. This was just a screening interview and interviewer just asked about some of the interesting problems that I have solved. We dived into some technical details and in the end of this 40 minute interview, he told me to wait for further communication. It was all very quick and they called me for an insite interview in Redmond. It consisted of meeting with 5 people on the day of the main interview, and each meeting was around 1 hr. It involved coding, algorithms, and analytical questions.
Overall, the interview process was a positive one. Great treatment and very professional process.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
One of the difficult question was about solving a puzzle with good algorithm and coding it up as well. I don't recall the puzzle's name now, but the solution involved using linked list (circular), and writing some classes and methods. In the end, testing was also required for this solution.