I applied through college or university. I interviewed at Microsoft (Redmond, WA)
Interview
First I had an on-campus interview with a recruiter with an easy coding question. A bit later they told me they wanted to fly me out to Redmond for on-site interviews. First I met with a recruiter who told me what the rest of the day was going to be like, then they called a shuttle to take me to another building for the interviews themselves. The first interviewer greeted me in the lobby, took me to the kitchen to offer me a drink, then led me to his office for the first interview. Each interviewer generally started by asking me about myself, asked a coding question, asked me to optimize my solution, asked how I should test my solution, then gave me some time to ask them any questions I had. This took about 45 minutes total per interview. Then they would take me to the kitchen to offer me another drink then pass me off onto the next interviewer. One interviewer in the middle took me to lunch, where we ordered our food and took it to his office to eat during the interview. I think there were 5 interviews total, all with members of the same team. Then I took a shuttle back to the first building, where the recruiter from that morning did a debriefing and sent me on my way.
They were all very nice throughout the process, and when I asked them questions, they were very honest in their responses, telling me both the pros and cons of working at Microsoft. The company was also very generous with respect to what they would pay for, especially food.
Interview questions [2]
Question 1
Determine if a linked list is cyclic, and if it is, find the length of the cycle.
You have an array of length n consisting of the integers from 0 through n-1 exactly once each, except for one which is missing. Find the missing number. The numbers can be in any order.
It started with a 90-minute online assessment, followed by a technical phone screen with one engineer. The OA covered two medium-to-hard algorithm problems. For coding practice, I mainly rely on "LeetCode" to cover different topics. For company-specific interview preparation, I use "Hack2Hire", "LeetCode Discuss", and "1Point3Acres" to find any recent original questions. All of them are helpful platforms. The phone screen included one coding problem and some discussion around edge cases and time complexity.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Given a list of meeting time intervals, determine if a person could attend all meetings.
I applied online. The process took 1 week. I interviewed at Microsoft in Dec 2024
Interview
I was invited to a technical interview with Microsoft. The interviewer started with a general question: “What happens when you type google.com into your browser?” They asked a few follow-up questions related to that.
After that, they gave me a LeetCode algorithmic question, which was at a hard level. The problem was “Integer to English Words.”
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
1. What happens when you type google.com into your browser?
2. “Integer to English Words” – LeetCode algorithmic question
Three tech interviews + one hiring manager VO, most of questions are medium to hard leetcode questions. Ask some questions about techniques you written on the resume. But I think they care more about the match of the research and the job.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Tell me about the recommendation System you made for the work.