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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30 minutes interview. First he asked me very few questions about my resume.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Interviewer asked this question "You have a string lets say "ABC" now write a program that prints out all the combinations of this string (for example: ACB, BAC, BCA...)"
Campus interview for 30 min. Behaviour questions first: what's the most difficult project you did before? Describe it. Then technical questions: Given a linkedlist, how to decide whether there is a loop? If there is, break the loop and make the list like a line.
I applied through an employee referral. The process took 3 days. I interviewed at Microsoft (Bellevue, WA) in Jan 2011
Interview
A colleague at MS referred me. I did a brief phone interview and then I spent an entire day at the Bravern office being interviewed by several people as well as having lunch. I thought I did well in all the interviews except for one interview about databases. The interviewer asked me several questions about database theory. I wasn't applying for a DBA job and wasn't aware that the "software developer" job would require extensive knowledge of database theory. At that point the interviewer seemed to assume that I didn't know anything about databases and instead we just talked about agile practices.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
The database interviewer started asking me questions like "why do you normalize" and "what are the different types of normalization"? I've worked with MySQL and SQL Server a fair amount, and I learned about normalization in a university course but couldn't talk about things like Boyce Codd Normal Form off the top of my head.