I applied through a recruiter. The process took 2 months. I interviewed at Microsoft (Bellevue, WA) in May 2019
Interview
Recruiter reached out to me for a specific role and I was scheduled to have the first telephonic interview. I did decently well on the technical and I was invited on site to Bellevue.
The on site interview was 4 rounds - each 45 minutes + lunch interview. The team mostly consisted of asian people and most of them treated me well. I bottled the first round - The interviewer went on for like 20-25 minutes explaining me about his team structure and how it fits into the business model etc. It was good to learn that but then it took away a lot of my time from the time allotted for the coding question ! Should I have stopped in between? I don't know but it backfired heavily since I couldn't finish the problem successfully. The second one went on well, the only round where I had a productive discussion and was pretty confident that I had done well enough. The third one was a simple coding question but with a lot of follow-up questions like how would you make the code work for any data type, edge cases and all that. The lunch interview was with the same one and he asked me a bunch of scenario based Qs and good practices in sw engg. The last one was pleasant to work with, really enjoyed talking to him and then I was done.
Overall I had a good set of challenges but as always I was not at my best or probably needed a better version of myself ! I knew when the day was over that I would't cut it. Probably the next time I guess ! I'll never give up ! Keep it coming !
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Technical interview:
>> How would you count the number of 1's in an integer. The question was not as simple as this. Lot of follow-up questions on how I would test this function, edge cases, different types of binary representations etc.
On site questions:
>> Linked list - reverse ONLY from nodes begin to end (begin, end) will be integer values
>> Next right pointers. Did it with both single queue and with two queues q1 and q2 and swapping them. Follow up - how do you cut down on memory.
>> All positive integers on left, negative on the other side - follow up was to modify it to a templated function
>> Given a string "Hello World", split all words. This was a programming session on the interviewer's computer (not whiteboard). There will be ONLY space as delimiter.
If a service can be called up to max of 5 times, how do you make sure it is handled.
I answered "sempahores".
I applied online. I interviewed at Microsoft in May 2026
Interview
1. Recruiter screen: recruiter was friendly but had their camera off. They asked me about my recent work experience, my strongest programming language, and salary expectations
2. Technical Screen: live HackerRank coding challenge with a team member of the team hiring for the role, over Microsoft Teams. The interviewer had their camera off but was easy to talk to. The coding challenge was a LeetCode-style challenge that required the backtracking algorithm. Interviewer spent extra time aftwards to take questions from me and share information about the team and employer.
3. 3x "Full Loop Interview Technical". The interviewers did not show up to these interviews. I emailed the recruiter who told me that interviewing for the role had been cancelled.
My overall impression of Microsoft based on their hiring practises is the company is dysfunctional, employees are disengaged, their hiring practises are disconnected from the actual job, and they don't care about candidate experience.
Moderate. Do leetcode tagged Microsoft questions. They generally ask from most recent Microsoft tagged questions. I applied without referral. Will have a technical screening with hiring manager. Then DSA and System design rounds.
Interview process:
Online assessment (hard level)
1-hour screening call
4 interviews in one day:
Medium-hard LeetCode (OOP-focused)
Medium-hard LeetCode DSA problem
Long system design interview (strong focus on relational database design)
Partner manager interview (AI-focused + behavioral)
The process was technically challenging and well-structured.
However, after the final interview, there was over one month of silence despite follow-up messages. Eventually, I received a generic rejection email stating:
"This decision does not reflect on your potential or the value of your experience."
I would have appreciated more timely communication and more specific feedback after such an extensive process.
