I applied through university. The process took 5 weeks. I interviewed at Microsoft (Redmond, WA) in Apr 2015
Interview
First interview was in University, they asked a matrix question from the "Cracking the programming interview" book. Afterwards they flew me to Redmond for the final round. They literally paid for everything: Hotel, flight, rental car, taxi, space needle ticket, meals and so on. During the day I had 5 interviews back to back. The questions are very standard but covers almost all data structures and algorithms. Still they are much easier than the ones i got from Google. Overall the interviewers are very nice and helpful. They made the interviews seem like a work place discussion rather than tests so i was very relaxed and confidently talked my way through it. Got an offer within a week.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Questions can mostly be found on geeksforgeeks, the topics include binarytree, recursion, 2d array, suffix trie, hashing etc.
1. implement "atoi"
2. the skylines problem
3. two lines on a 2d dimension, given their end points, check if they intersect (this is more of a math problem but i just coded it up in C++)
4. binary tree modification, make all parents' values be the sum of their direct children.
there are more but I can't remember.
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.
