I applied online. The process took 6 weeks. I interviewed at Microsoft (Kyiv, Kyiv) in Nov 2012
Interview
When I applied to them, it turned out they were planning to have a campus recruiting event in my city (Moscow) within next 2 weeks, though unfortunately I was on a trip at that time so couldn't make it. Thus they made one phone interview (with a recruiter) and invited me to a recruiting event in Kiev six weeks later.
There they had two groups of interviewees coming at different times, each group consisting of 6 people. Every person would undergo 3 or 4 interviews (each 45-minutes long). After every interview interviewers exchange some feedback and you listen to the HR guy who promotes Seattle as a place to live. After that you go to another interview. After 3 interviews they analyse the feedback and decide who stays for another interview. If you aren't invited to the fourth interview, that doesn't mean you wouldn't get an offer. I personally got an offer after only 3.
The questions vary in difficulty depending on your interviewer, but overall I found them harder than in other major companies (Google, Facebook). As usually, if you have ever participated in programming competitions, you have better chances of solving their problems.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
I don't think I can disclose the exact question, but one of the interviewers actually asked two questions, one of then being some kind of "real world" open-ended one, and another one seemed to be algorithmic, the problem was that there was no solution, and even the interviewer had some ideas about it but not the complete solution.
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.
