I applied through college or university. The process took 4 weeks. I interviewed at Microsoft (Seattle, WA) in Nov 2015
Interview
Brief technical in person interview and then an onsite interview. The onsite was the most impersonal experience I've ever had with a company. There were around 40 of us there and interviewers would walk into the room and find us by name then lead us to a separate interview room. I should have had 4 rounds of technical interviews, but one interviewer did not show up so I had 3. I was only asked technical questions, very little about my background, and two of my interviewers were very open about how they had not even looked at my resume. You don't know what team you're interviewing with until you get there. HR does the typical "So... Do you have any other offers?" thing. But what Microsoft lacked in personality, they made up for by completely showering us in money. Seriously, they give you the means to spoil yourself while you're there!
Interview questions [3]
Question 1
Given a directory string "c/a/../b/./d" write a method that outputs the final directory. (In this example, "c/b/d"). A "." input stays in the current directory, a ".." input goes back one.
Design a method midNumbers(start, end, length) that prints the middle values between two integers. Ex: midNumbers(0,5,2) would print 2,3. midNumbers(1,10,4) would print 4,5,6,7. This question was left VERY vague and I think it was intentionally left up to the interviewee to clarify as much as possible. Follow ups included "How would you check for appropriate input? How would you protect against attacks, such as a buffer overflow attack? What are some cases that you would test to check that the method is working correctly?"
How would you convert a row number on Excel to a label? Rows are labeled alphabetically with letters added on once the alphabet has been fully used. (Ex. row # 5 is labeled E, row # 27 is labeled AA, row # 28 is AB, row # 53 is BA and so forth) What would the row label be for a large number, such as 1500?
It started with a 90-minute online assessment, followed by a technical phone screen with one engineer. The OA covered two medium-to-hard algorithm problems. For coding practice, I mainly rely on "LeetCode" to cover different topics. For company-specific interview preparation, I use "Hack2Hire", "LeetCode Discuss", and "1Point3Acres" to find any recent original questions. All of them are helpful platforms. The phone screen included one coding problem and some discussion around edge cases and time complexity.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Given a list of meeting time intervals, determine if a person could attend all meetings.
I applied online. The process took 1 week. I interviewed at Microsoft in Dec 2024
Interview
I was invited to a technical interview with Microsoft. The interviewer started with a general question: “What happens when you type google.com into your browser?” They asked a few follow-up questions related to that.
After that, they gave me a LeetCode algorithmic question, which was at a hard level. The problem was “Integer to English Words.”
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
1. What happens when you type google.com into your browser?
2. “Integer to English Words” – LeetCode algorithmic question
Three tech interviews + one hiring manager VO, most of questions are medium to hard leetcode questions. Ask some questions about techniques you written on the resume. But I think they care more about the match of the research and the job.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Tell me about the recommendation System you made for the work.
