Microsoft Interview Questions & Reviews

Interview Details I submitted a resume while at the Canadian Undergraduate Technology Conference. A recruiter emailed me shortly after, followed by a brief, fairly straightforward phone interview. This was followed by an invitation to fly out to Redmond for a day of in-person interviews. (Note to other applicants: that particular email was misclassified as spam by my email provider! The words “Microsoft,” “job,” and all of the all-caps text related to flight details was enough to set off the spam filter.) The day of interviews was long, but surprisingly fun. I was interviewed by members from a few different teams, so the day didn’t drag – there was always something new to talk about.

Interview Details After apply through my college recruiter I got a first-round phone interview. It lasted about 45 minutes and first involved a few behaviour questions (e.g. Why do you want to work at Microsoft, what kind of coding are doing outside of school). After, I was bombarded by a plethora of technical questions. Here are a few of them:

What are differences between Java and C?
Why would someone use Java over C/C++ and vice-versa?
What's inheritance?
What's a virtual function?
What's the JVM?
What's a disadvantage of the JVM ?
What's the difference between an array and linkedlist?

After this I was asked one coding question: Reverse a singly linked-list with and without using an auxiliary data structure.

Interview Details Through the University of Waterloo recruitment (jobmine). They e-mailed me for a 1st round interview: nothing too out of the blue. Basic behavioural questions, one technical/coding question, one discussion question about technology and how it can be improved. Be sure to ask them questions which makes them think as well.

Interview Details The department manager and a co-op student interviewed for the position (which was via the University job board). The interview was 30 minutes long, and consisted of only a general set of questions. The questions were very clear-cut (nothing too weird, to "test out personality and quick thinking" sort).

Interview Details The interview experience was awesome and was worth remembering even though it happened to me approximately 6 years ago. Thank you Microsoft.

Two phone interviews, flew me to Montreal for 3 more rounds of face-to-face interviews
1) Phone Interview 1 - asked me about basic data structure (linked-list, stack etc..)
2) Phone interview 2 - asked me about a binary tree and write out a sorting algo for the binary tree

3) Face-to-face interview 1 - design a phone book for mobile applications
4) Face-to-face interview 2 - implement a sudoku game
5) Face-to-face interview 3 - an algo to detect an "inflection point" in a semi-sorted array of integers

Failed to proceed to interview Face-to-face interview 6 & 7 (back then, the 7th interview was for the hiring details).

Interview Details Initial Communication: Received a call from current intern who then scheduled a Skype interview.

Skype Interview: Basic behavioural and competency based questions. "Tell me about a time you..." type questions.

Screened through to final round of interviews in-person:
- Arrived at the same time as three other finalists. At that point, we rotated through 30-minute interviews with the three different managers. Each asked similar questions about past work experience in sales and marketing, future aspirations, interest in Microsoft, familiarity their products, etc.

Interview Details Phone Interview

Interview Details Initial position was posted through the university. I submitted a resume and a cover letter.

They then requested an interview, which I went to and received an offer 2 days later. It was a nice process and the hiring managers and interviewing managers were really friendly.

Negotiation Details – Not open for associate negotiations. They were friendly in their responses though.

Interview Details It was through university campus, got a phone interview. It was more of a HR, and she asked me some puzzles. Hard to say if I gave the correct answers, as the questions were very open ended.