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 -
I applied through a recruiter. The process took 4 weeks. I interviewed at Microsoft (Seattle, WA) in Nov 2015
Interview
I gave my resume to a recruiter at my school's career fair. Got an email back and had a 30 minute interview at my school's career center. In the interview, we mostly just talked about interests and general questions about data structures. The coding problem was to implement a linked list. I passed that interview and was flown out to Seattle for final round interviews. They pay for everything they can and then reimburse you for everything else, including food and a small stipend for site seeing, so the trip was great. The day of the interview everyone showed up at 7:30am for a quick breakfast (fruit, rolls, bagels, etc) in a common area. There were about 40 other candidates being interviewed during that time. About 60% female, 40% male. And about 60% Indian, 25% Asian, and 15% Caucasian. Then we each had four 45 minutes interviews, with 15 minute breaks between each one. Two of the interviewers are from one team in Microsoft and the other two are from another team. They make hiring decisions independent of one another so you could theoretically get offers from both teams (or none). Of the four of us interview candidates from my university, we all seemed to be interview by entirely different teams. (How they determined what teams you would be interviewing with was somewhat of a mystery to us.) Unfortunately for me, both the teams I interviewed with were in charge of back-end development. And I let both of them know that I had zero desire for that. Front-end all the way. After the interviews, we were taken over to another building on their campus for lunch. Lots of places to choose from and the campus is really nice. Overall, I think the best part was staying in the fancy hotel and going to the space needle and big Ferris wheel but I guess those parts are very aside from the actual objective of it all.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Write an implementation of a linked with functions for inserting and deleting at specified indexes.
I applied through college or university. I interviewed at Microsoft in Feb 2016
Interview
Dropped resume at career fair and was contacted for on-campus interview a few days later. Only a 30 minute scheduled interview. First question was straightforward. Second question was purely conceptual and my explanation wasn't as smooth so that's what probably did it for me. Otherwise the interviewer was laid back and nice to talk with.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Given a list of objects, each with a unique hashcode, how would you find a duplicate? What if the list was so large that it didn't fit on one computer?
I applied through college or university. The process took 1 day. I interviewed at Microsoft (Austin, TX) in Feb 2016
Interview
The interview was on campus/in person. Very short, it was only about 20 or 30 minutes. Only one question was asked, and the interviewer didn't seem to pay much attention.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Data structures question: What data structure would you use for BFS on a tree? Write code to implement the algorithm