I applied in-person. The process took 1 day. I interviewed at Microsoft (Seattle, WA) in Apr 2015
Interview
Phone screen, 1st Interview- Design Questions, 2nd- OOPs, 3rd- Binary Tree and Palindrome, 4th String traversal, 5th (Hiring Manager)-Meeting booking
Design elevator, OOPs concepts with an example, Data Structure- Print Binary Tree layers in sequence, Find consecutive occurrence of a character in a string, Design calendar booking system to not to allow booking more than 3 overlapping meetings and the lowest possible interval is a milisecond.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Design elevator, OOPs concepts with an example, Data Structure- Print Binary Tree layers in sequence, Find consecutive occurrence of a character in a string, Design calendar booking system to not to allow booking more than 3 overlapping meetings and the lowest possible interval is a milisecond.
I applied online. The process took 1 day. I interviewed at Microsoft (Redmond, WA) in Feb 2015
Interview
This was a "hiring event" where 10 people were flown in together, met the coordinators as a group, then were each given their own room. Each candidate was interviewed by 4 Microsoft people, for 45 minutes each interview. There was a 15 minute break between interviews. Interviews were a combination of questions about your background/resume and a technical question involving coding and problem solving. At the end there was 5 minutes to ask about the job, but not a lot of detail given.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Solve the readers/writers problem. Do it without semaphores. Back up 3 large tables where records in one table reference records in the other two, while adds, deletes and updates are going on. No SQL DB, no referential integrity, no locking.
I applied through an employee referral. The process took 3 weeks. I interviewed at Microsoft in Aug 2012
Interview
I was referred by a previous employee to a team that was looking to hire. I submitted my resume. HR setup a phone interview with a senior engineer with coding questions: iterate a tree in order, pre-order, and post-order, recursively, then iteratively for the pre-order and in order. An iterative post order traversal is somewhat obscure.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
If your manager asked you to design a new C memory allocator (malloc() and free()), what changes would you make to the current one?