The process took 1 day. I interviewed at Microsoft (Redmond, WA) in Dec 2008
Interview
Phone screen with the recruiter was primarily around scheduling. Interview was the standard day long affair with a good hour and a half spent waiting in the lobby due to scheduling problems. I find that to be fairly tacky, I'd never allow it for my candidates, but that is how Microsoft does things.
Interviews were fairly easy, some design questions which are typically won by having a good stream of ideas and the ability to defend some of the ideas (I don't think most interviewers consider it a bad thing if you reject one of your own ideas).
Interviewers would sometimes throw random analytical problems at me as a response to something I'd said. For example, we were talking about ordering of search results and he asked out of the blue how many possible orderings there were of a list of n search results (hint: n!).
Microsoft interview feedback is all sent immediately upon completion of the interview so the following interviews sometimes touched on information in the previous ones (also: it is important to do well on the first few because their hire/no-hire suggestions will influence following interview results).
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
design an experiment to optimize the quality of search results on a google-like search engine.
I applied through a recruiter. The process took 6 months. I interviewed at Microsoft (Hyderabad) in Oct 2009
Interview
The overall hiring process was really time consuming and interview dates were changed many times during the whole process. The venue in NCR was OK. I was finally called for a full day interview to their Hyderabad office. Types of questions asked in the interview were really open ended in nature and some where related to real-life with no right or wrong answer. They mostly probed on the thought process, ability to cover different aspects of the problem. Though the event was not well planned in terms of managing time but overall I consider this a good experience.
I applied through a recruiter. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Microsoft (Redmond, WA) in Jan 2007
Interview
Very straightforward, but that was only my experience as a mid-career new hire.
As I understand from others, the interview process can be very tricky.
The best way to get a position here is to start as a paid intern and spend a summer working on real projects.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
What is your major weakness and how would that apply to this job?