I applied through college or university. The process took 1 day. I interviewed at Microsoft in Oct 2009
Interview
Got the interview from speaking with an engineer at a university career fair. During the interview, I was asked about my undergraduate courses. He asked what my favorite class was. I've heard from other students that they've also been asked the same question. The interviewer went over the different available positions they were hiring for, and he went through a quick form about which positions I would be interested in. After some general background and interest questions, he asked me to solve a coding problem on a white board. I personally found the setup pretty intimidating with the interviewer staring at the back of my head, but the question wasn't too bad. The question was as follows: Given two strings, how would you remove from the first string all the characters which appear in the second string. I thought I did decently well and the interviewer seemed satisfied. Overall, the interview was so-so, but not extraordinary.
Interview questions [2]
Question 1
What was your favorite class in school so far and why?
I applied through college or university. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Microsoft (Raleigh, NC) in Mar 2010
Interview
I applied to Microsoft for an internship on the basis of a campus job posting. About 2-3 weeks later, I got an email asking me for a convenient time to schedule a phone interview. I was informed that the phone interview will be very technical and will involve hands-on coding. However, the phone interview turned out to be a general HR interview rather than a technical interview. Your answers are then noted down by the interviewer and attached to the resume and is circulated to various hiring managers. If selected, the next step would have been an on-site interview at Seattle. I was unfortunately sent a rejection letter after 3 days following the phone interview.
I applied through a recruiter. The process took 1 day. I interviewed at Microsoft in Mar 2010
Interview
Asked to write code for "aha" sort of task. Wrote solution that was not optimal and was asked to improve performance, which I did. The interviewer seemed to be satisfied, but the recruiter told me that I did not pass. Microsoft should stop asking stupid questions that have no relation to typical software development problems.