I applied through a recruiter. The process took 3+ months. I interviewed at Microsoft (Redmond, WA) in Oct 2013
Interview
I reached out to the interviewer assigned to my region September, during my penultimate semester at college. We have scheduled a phone interview for a month later. The phone interview was similar to described by others, testing your knowledge about Microsoft, asking you to describe their favourite product, also checking your motivation behind applying to MSFT. Avoid cliche answers like: "I want to work for MSFT because of stability". Make sure you study what they do, especially stuff unrelated to the technical field like their community service, donations etc.
Once that was done, I received an invitation to onsite interviews. This was the moment crap hit the fan because despite applying for Hardware ENgineering position and insisting I want to do hardware/system level software I was assigned to interview with the MS Office division for cloud services position where my experiences and programming languages were a little inapplicable. But I was not aware of that until the very last interview.
Anyway, they flew me to Redmond for the technical interviews. The technical questions were related to data structures and recursion: 4 interveiwers asked me to code a solution to a problem on a white board. If your solution is not the best (90% of the time it wont) they will ask you how would you improve it.
The last interviewer finally told me that the whole time I was interviewing for a wrong position. SO I spoke with the coordinator and they told me they will try to fix it. They directed me to the recruiter who assigned me to that particular division. That interviewer promised to call me to speak about it. I scheduled the phone call but nobody ever called me. Then I had enough.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Recursive fibonacci, make a lookup table to speed it up;
Remove duplicated letters in a string
Given a linked list where every node points to two different nodes, make a duplicate of it.
The interview was a long process. There was first the recruiter screen, which was followed by a 4-loop interview structure that covered technical, behavioral, and system design. The interviewers were very kind and accommodating.
I applied online. The process took 3 weeks. I interviewed at Microsoft
Interview
After my application to ClipChamp - Microsoft, a recruiter reached out and scheduled my first interview. It was about basic interview questions and background analysis. After that I had my technical interview. The recruiter specifically said that I would be facing medium hacker rank questions. So I prepared accordingly. However, what I actually got was to analyse an application and re work it according to new requirements. I felt like I was set up for failure on purpose. Didn’t even hear back after that interview.
Took a bit longer than I thought, spanning about three weeks from start to finish. After a quick recruiter screen, I had a technical round where I was asked about validating a binary search tree. The wild part is, I had literally seen this exact problem on prachub.com while prepping. It helped me feel more confident discussing my approach and edge cases. There was also a behavioral interview where I shared my experiences, and eventually, I received an offer. I chose to decline it, though, as it wasn't the right fit for me at the time.