I applied through an employee referral. The process took 4 weeks. I interviewed at Microsoft (Bellevue, WA) in Oct 2011
Interview
Phone screens to establish initial contact, basic fit for a particular team.
Travel, 5 in-person interviews, mainly coding, design discussion, and general CS knowledge over the course of a day including lunch.
Final travel to meet 2 more people later.
Then several weeks of background checks, final offer.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
One interesting interview was a "find out how much you know very quickly" interview.
Questions included:
- What's a hash function?
- How can it be used as part of a dictionary?
- If you're designing a hash function for a class that will be used as part of a dictionary lookup, what things should you consider?
- Sketch an design for a tree-like data structure, and then an algorithm for depth-first search.
- What are precision and recall? How are they defined? Why are they defined this way not some other way? (Note: the position I was applying for was on a data / machine learning project, so this certainly wasn't an overspecialized question.)
HR screening, one technical interview with the hiring manager then three interview loop which covered two system design and one dsa round.
System design was intensive and challenging.
It took them 5 weeks to come back with an offer. Background check was completed in a week, got joining date after 3 days.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Design a system for a startup company that let users post various types of content and get a unique url which can be shared with others to access the content
Started with a recruiter phone call and a 30 minute phone call with the hiring manager to negotiate a remote role since the job was based in Seattle and the manager agreed. Following up with five rounds of virtual on site. Four of them are coding/design. One of them is behavioral mostly leetcode medium level questions which I finished and I was able to do all the follow up and answer the design and time complexity questions correctly after the interview got ghosted for a whole month and got an automatic rejection email.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Leet code medium level questions. DFS, BFS, sliding windows and greedy algorithm. Follow up, asking some design questions and the time complexity of the code.