Software Developer 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 -
First there was a phone interview, a bit technical, but not that much: "tell me about yourself", "difficulties", "how you handled them", "what is your experience". Then on sight interview, took 2 hours.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
One page question, writing a message queue system that get from one queue and write to another, and there are 2 processes handling these whole thing - Multi threaded.
1 Algorithm and 1 Data structure question
I applied through college or university. The process took 2 months. I interviewed at Microsoft (Roorkee) in Dec 2017
Interview
It was campus placement.
Process consisted of Online Test followed by group-fly and then interviews on campus.
1. Online Test : It had 3 coding questions. Test was of moderate level.
2. Group Fly Round : Then there was on group fly round on campus in which we were given two questions and we had to solve and code the solutions on paper. Then they evaluated and shortlisted candidates for interviews.
3. Interviews : Had three round of interviews with two being purely technical and last one being technical cum HR round.
Interview questions [10]
Question 1
[Online Test] Q1 : Given prices of a stock on N days in an array, find the max profit we can make by buying and selling in those days.
[Interviews - Round 2] Q1 : Given strategy/protocol on how producer would produce. Tell the strategy for consumer to consume in single producer multiple consumer model.
[Interviews - Round 2] Q2 : Write functions to find the middle node of a linked list and insert near middle such that after the insertion middle element does not change.
[Interviews - Round 3] Q1 : Given a shuffle function which shuffles 52 cards you want to check whether the functions is good shuffler or bad. You can do so by performing 10 M (or 100 M or 1 B) shuffles. Now give us a efficient strategy to perform this and give efficient data structure.
[Interviews - Round 3] Q2 : This was mainly HR questions. Some of the questions are What do you want to do in life ? How did you get AIR 737 in JEE. What are your strong points / skills.
I applied through an employee referral. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Microsoft (Seattle, WA) in Dec 2018
Interview
Got an internal referral and recruiter phone interview first. Secondly finished online assessment which was very easy, then went to the on-site hire event with four rounds of coding questions.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Lowest Common Ancestor in a Binary Tree; Detect and Remove Loop in a Linked List