I applied through an employee referral. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Microsoft in Oct 2015
Interview
Phone interview where brain teasers were asked. I had already heard the first question asked so they immediately moved onto another question. I expected more technical questions would be asked. Interviewer asked questions about resume and personal projects as well. Overall experience was pleasant but it felt like it was an interview for a Project Manager position rather than Software Development Engineer.
I applied through college or university. The process took 5 days. I interviewed at Microsoft (Saint Paul, MN) in Feb 2014
Interview
Had a 30 minute phone interview with one of the recruiters. It had a lot of behavioural questions and a brain teaser. Also had questions about complexity and explaining recursion.
You have 9 balls and one of them weighs more than the rest. You also have a scale and your goal is to find the heavy ball using the scale . You can only use the scale twice.
I applied through college or university. The process took 3 days. I interviewed at Microsoft (Calcuta) in Aug 2015
Interview
I applied during Microsoft campus recruitment event at my university. On the first day we sat for 2 online rounds- 1st one was an MCQ round focused on OS, Data structures, & details of C/C++ & JAVA programming languages. The questions were quite challenging. After that there was a coding round where 2 questions on data structures & simple graph theory had to be solved. This round was surprisingly easy.
After a day's gap the selected candidates were called for P.I's. There were several rounds spread over 2 days including a group round(not a group discussion though). Very high emphasis was placed on data structures, algorithms but they also wanted to test our ability to analyze & frame a solution( even if that solution is not the optimal one) for some open ended problems. The interviewers were quite friendly & helped out when they felt a liile nudge in the right direction was needed.
One suggestion, brush up on more "advanced" data structures like Tries, segment trees, red black trees, interval tree etc.. If you can demonstrate a good grasp over these topics, the interviewers seem to be impressed.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Give an efficient implementation of Djikstras's shortest path algorithm