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 online. The process took 3 months. I interviewed at Microsoft (Redmond, WA) in Feb 2016
Interview
Applied online. Recruiter contacted me and set up a phone screen. The phone screen was for 45 minutes and consisted of puzzles and questions about my resume, past experiences, projects, etc. Got a reply within 2 days that I had cleared the phone round and would move on to the onsite interviews. It took almost 2 months to schedule the onsite due to scheduling conflicts. Onsite interviews started after lunch and consisted of 4 back to back interviews of about 45 mins each. 3 of them were coding and 1 was a design problem. All on the whiteboard.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
DS and algorithms based. Questions similar to the moderate/ hard from CTCI.
I applied through college or university. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Microsoft (Toronto, ON) in Dec 2015
Interview
The interviewers were very nice. Applicants are dual-tracked for PM and SE roles, but the interviews focused mainly on the technical side of things. They didn't really care about language choice or writing 100% proper code on the whiteboard, and cared more about the solution and how I got there (more companies should be doing this, in my opinion).
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Determine whether parentheses are properly matched on a string.
I applied online. The process took 3 weeks. I interviewed at Microsoft (Redmond, WA) in Mar 2016
Interview
I had a 15-20min phone screen with a recruiter. She pressed really hard trying to get my current salary which I refused to disclose. I then did a phone interview with the hiring manager. A week later I was brought in for a full day. There were 4 scheduled interviews with one over lunch. At the end, there was a surprise 5th interview which I was told was a very good sign. Each interview was very conversational. They didn't feel like interviews at all.