I applied through university. The process took 3 weeks. I interviewed at Microsoft (Redmond, WA) in Mar 2011
Interview
Basically, they came to my university and we had a phone interview. After that, they selected a group to fly up to redmond for the weekend and we had a full day of interviews. Each interview is with a different team that you can work with and all operate roughly independently (i.e. if you bomb one, you can still get in with a different team). After that, you wait for each team to decide whether they want you (they typically choose their top few candidates and then get the first one that isnt taken by another group).
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
One example that I thought was interesting: given a list of points, find the line that goes through the greatest number of them.
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.