I applied through college or university. The process took 1 day. I interviewed at Microsoft in Feb 2011
Interview
Got an on campus interview call from Microsoft University Recruiter. It started off with a 5 minute discussion on my career goals & my previous work experience. He asked me if i had faced any issues in one of my development projects & how i tackled it. Then there were a few technical questions on caching, performance of web servers & a converting a two dimensional array into a single dimensional array. The interview lasted about 20 minutes.
Given an 2 dimensional array of pixels on a monitor, how to convert that into a single dimensional array & what would then be the input to control a pixel?
I applied through college or university. The process took 6 weeks. I interviewed at Microsoft (Redmond, WA) in Mar 2012
Interview
Applied through university, was contacted a few days later for an on-campus interview.
Was invited to have an on-site interview in Redmond 4-5 weeks later.
4 interview rounds.
The three most important skills they were looking for are:
1) the ability to code well
2) the ability to test correctly and creatively
3) the ability to learn quickly
Microsoft provides many great resources for preparing for your interview and if you utilize them correctly, the interviews you will face should not be terribly difficult.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Test a feature in a windows product (product depends on whatever division you're applying for)