I applied through a recruiter. The process took 4 weeks. I interviewed at Microsoft (Chicago, IL) in May 2013
Interview
I was contracted by a Microsoft recruiter though LinkedIn. Had a phone screen with the recruiter talking about my background and a technical phone interview 1 week later. Then I was invited to a hiring event in Chicago for an on-site interview. Onsite interview includes 4 rounds , 1 hour each. Interview questions includes white board coding, system design and some other open questions. All of the interviewers are pretty nice and friendly, they focus on how you approach the problem and communicate with them. I was interviewed on Thursday and got an offer on the following Tuesday.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
1. Design a String class. Then write code to implement Insert(). Discuss performance about Insert and Lookup. The goal is to fine a solution that achieves O(logN) for both Insert and Lookup.
2. Write code for Push/Get to implement a ring buffer based on a fixed size char buffer.
3. Communication between Client/Server for a remote file system is based on a unreliable link (99% up-time but sometimes packet can be dropped). The client can send request like Open, Read, Write, Seek, Close, Create, Delete to the server. How would this system deal with packet loss? ACK is not allowed, so you CANNOT use a TCP like protocol.
4. Write code to implement a method that returns the top 10 most frequent words in a given string.
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.
