I applied through university. The process took 2 months. I interviewed at Microsoft in Oct 2014
Interview
I handed my resume to an on-campus recruiter. A few days later, I got an email asking me to sign up for an interview slot on campus. I had an interview a few weeks later with a PM from the Mountain View campus. She recommended me for a SDE internship, and about 2 weeks after that interview I was notified that I would be flown to Redmond for final rounds. They changed the location to Mountain View, CA a few weeks later. I flew over, stayed over two nights, and on the second day, had my interview. There were four rounds, based in C++ (my most familiar language was Java). The last round was with a high-up manager who talked about Microsoft's goals and future direction. I heard less than 24 hours after my last interview through email that I got a position as a summer intern. Whole process was ~2 months because of my busy finals period and trying to schedule a time to fly over to California.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Questions were based on bit manipulation and more low-level computation/ theory, which I was not expecting. I studied more for data structures, recursion, and OOP questions.
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.