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.
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I applied through a recruiter. The process took 4 weeks. I interviewed at Microsoft (Redmond, WA) in Mar 2017
Interview
Start off with basic HR screening. Then online test with 5 simple to borderline medium coding questions in 1 hour. Once you clear that you get called for an on site round. Onsite had 4 (3 coding + 1 design and coding) interviews 45 minutes each with a 10-15 minute break between each interview.
Most of the interviewers were very nice. The recruiters are very nice and really want you to succeed.
Heard back next day about the offer.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Coding, basic data structures and thought process.
I applied through college or university. The process took 8 weeks. I interviewed at Microsoft (Seattle, WA) in Dec 2016
Interview
I applied at my universities career fair.
First was a 30 minute on-campus coding interview. The problem was equivalent to a leetcode easy, and the follow up was around a medium.
After that, I was contacted to do an onsite. I was expecting a lot of algorithms, which is what I studied for. However, to my surprise, most of my interviews were behavioral. I had one brain teaser I didn't do too well on, but the rest I feel went very well.
In the end, I didn't get an offer. I suspect this is due to a couple factors: it being very late in the interview cycle (not too many positions left) and lack of algorithms. I couldn't differentiate myself enough from the students that went to better schools solely based off behavioral questions.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Preorder, Inorder, and Postorder traversal of binary tree.
I applied through college or university. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Microsoft in Sep 2016
Interview
MS came to my school in a career fair. I chatted with a guy, who was an alumnus of my school, and submitted my resume. About a week later I was contacted for an on-campus interview. I thought I did well when the interviewer said I was the first one that solved the problem and wrote clean code. The problem was easy for me. Then, we chatted a little bit about his team and his work. The interviewer said I should hear back in 2-3 weeks.
I went home and waiting for a call but didn't hear anything after 1-2 months. I tried to email the recruiter who arranged the interview several times but she never replied. Because I won a programming competition hosted by MS, someone from MS sent me the reward and I took that chance to ask and received a typical rejection letter, which I anticipated. I would say that the recruiters had done a good job in damaging the image of MS.