Intern applicants have rated the interview process at Microsoft with 2.3 out of 5 (where 5 is the highest level of difficulty) and assessed their interview experience as 33% positive. To compare, the company-average is 67.6% positive. This is according to Glassdoor user ratings.
Common stages of the interview process at Microsoft as a Intern according to 3 Glassdoor interviews include:
Phone interview: 100%
Here are the most commonly searched roles for interview reports -
I applied through college or university. The process took 2 months. I interviewed at Microsoft
Interview
I had dropped my resume in the University Career fair and they got back to me within a week or so to schedule an interview in my college.
Onsite Interview (at my university):
I had a 30 minute Onsite interview. It started off with why I was interested in MSFT. The interviewer then explained my the 3 different roles (SDE, SDET and PM) and I was asked which particular roles I was interested in. After that, I was given a simple question on Binary trees and I was asked to write a program. I had written a recursive code and was asked about the drawbacks of using recursive programs. And then I was asked to write test cases for my program.
I guess what they were looking for primarily was
1. Interest in the company
2. If I can write good code and make sure there are no room for error
3. How broad are my test cases and the scenarios
After around 2 weeks, I got a mail that I had cleared the first round and they were flying me to seattle for the next set of rounds.
Interview in Seattle:
There were around 15 of us and we were made to sit in one of the conference rooms with food. We were expected to have 4 rounds of interviews with different sets of employees and each interview would last for 45 minutes followed by a 15 minute break. By around 1, there were around 15 employees coming in and calling out a name and they would be interviewing us. The same happened for the next 4 rounds too.
The questions were pretty straight forward and simple. The ones you'd find in the career cup books.
After the 4 rounds of interviews, we were taken to the recreation room where we had Xboxs to play with and to keep our mind off the interview results. They called us one by one and gave the results the same day. And we were given around a week to accept the offer
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
There's an m x n array. A block in the array is denoted by a 1 and a 0 indicates no block. You are supposed to find the number of objects in the array. A object is nothing but a set of blocks that are connected horizontally and/or vertically.
eg
0 1 0 0
0 1 0 0
0 1 1 0
0 0 0 0
0 1 1 0
There are 2 objects in this array. The L shape object and the object in the last row.
I had seen this question before and was able to write the code for it. The question that followed was "Lets say you have multiple processors that can do the task parallely for you. How would you divide the task among these processors for the above problem"
I applied through college or university. The process took 1 day. I interviewed at Microsoft in Dec 2012
Interview
Applied through my school. Had a 30 minute in-person interview which included discussing my resume and experiences, microsoft, etc. as well as a whiteboard programming problem.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Implement a simple compression algorithm where repeated letters in a string are represented by a count and the letter. Example: AAACBBD = 3A1C2B1D
I applied online. The process took 3 days. I interviewed at Microsoft (Cambridge, MA) in Jun 2011
Interview
Emailed a recruiter about The Foundry, one of Microsoft's summer internship programs. Received an email back asking to set up a phone interview that very day.
The phone interview was nothing heavy, just general questions about my history as an undergraduate student, favorite project, etc.
I was invited for an on-site, along with a group of maybe 10 others that morning. Very nice people. There was a generous breakfast for all of us. Met with 4 engineers for about an hour each. Three were technical. I had to do things like demonstrate websites that I thought had a nice UI, talk about the inner workings (hardware and software) of a mobile device (in a general sense), and some whiteboard coding.
I was told immediately after the process ended that I was not chosen. They sat us in a room and called us out one by one to break the news. We weren't aware at the moment, but those that remained in the room were hired.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Here are a few: shuffle a deck of cards, convert a string of numbers (such as "123") into type integer or float, brainstorm some of the API that would be called by a mobile application on a mobile OS.