Software Engineer applicants have rated the interview process at Microsoft with 4 out of 5 (where 5 is the highest level of difficulty) and assessed their interview experience as 50% positive. To compare, the company-average is 68.2% positive. This is according to Glassdoor user ratings.
Here are the most commonly searched roles for interview reports -
I applied through an employee referral. I interviewed at Microsoft
Interview
I was referred by a friend of mine. They took a very long time to get back to me and finally scheduled a phone interview. Unlike most phone interviews where there is a coderpad of some sort that I am coding on, he simply wanted me to describe how something would work to him which was difficult as I had a hard time understanding the interviewer.
After struggling to understand what he was looking for and attempting an explanation he rudely interrupted me. He then said "Normally I would ask more questions but I think I have everything I need. Maybe sometime when you understand these thing you can work for Microsoft." And that was it.
Overall the interviewer was extremely rude, hard to understand, and very pretentious.
I applied through college or university. The process took 2 months. I interviewed at Microsoft (Seattle, WA) in Oct 2015
Interview
I briefly chatted with a recruiter during a school career fair and dropped my resume. I was contacted for an on-campus screening interview the very next day. This interview was fairly smooth, but I then heard nothing for more than a month. At this point, I assumed that I had been filtered out on the first round. However, I received an email from the recruiter informing me that I would soon be scheduled for an on-site interview. Again, this was followed by radio silence for another month, at which point I had basically given up. More than two months after the first screen I finally got an on-site scheduled in Seattle, which consisted of 4 interviews (3 technical, 1 behavioral) over the course of a day. The interviewers and recruiters were nice, but it was still somewhat frustrating having my application hang in limbo for so long.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Technical: questions about trees of different kinds (building, maintaining, and walking binary trees and special variants). Asked to pseudocode an efficient algorithm for processing and reassembling data from possibly overlapping TCP packets.
Behavioral: Mostly standard questions about projects I had listed on my resume (e.g. 'tell me about a time when you had to balance stakeholders in design of a product . . .')
I applied through college or university. I interviewed at Microsoft
Interview
30 minutes on campus interview. Very simple. Introduce yourself, tell a little bit about your experience and a coding problem. The coding problem is not very difficult. Since the time is not very long, the interviewer did not ask many questions