I applied through a recruiter. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Microsoft (Redmond, WA) in Jun 2015
Interview
Got a call from the recruiter, who setup a phone screen with one of the members of the hiring team. That process took about a week
After clearing the tech screen I was invited onsite for a round of interviews , the entire process took about 2 weeks
Round 1 - Dynamic programming and the interviewer doesn't acknowledge the concept of using an array of 256 characters and wants me to throw in the phrase "we will use a Hashmap". A question which if solved genuinely takes a few hours and cannot be finished and tested in 40 mins unless we are copying it from leetcode
Round 2 - Design the game of boggle and return a list of all the words that are of length 3 or more, i gave the recursive solution by the end but the interviewer is looking for a better solution ( recursive but less lines of code), a question which cannot be coded and tested in 40 mins
Round 3 - What is a binary search tree ? why do we use them ? Write code to check if a given binary tree is a binary search tree ( gave the solution using in-order traversal but the interviewer thinks that the code is hard to read and isn't maintainable and writes a line of code using the Enumerable class of C#
He then goes on for 30 minutes on a NP complete problem and did not have a clear idea of what he was asking, " we use constraints" and "these are problems open discussions" were the 2 phrases iterated throughout
A negative experience
I applied through a recruiter. I interviewed at Microsoft
Interview
Got contacted by the recruiter with the online test first, I finished all six or seven questions. Then been invented to onsite interview for roughly half a day. Good Experience. No phone interview in between, that's is. Thank you.
I applied through an employee referral. The process took 1 day. I interviewed at Microsoft (Redmond, WA) in Oct 2011
Interview
Multi round interview that generally takes the whole day. Each interviewer will ask a series of questions and at least one interviewer will have you complete a coding problem on the whiteboard.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
If you received an offer from a team other than this one would you accept it.