I applied online. The process took 12 months. I interviewed at Microsoft (Redmond, WA) in Nov 2019
Interview
1. Technical screening with hiring manager
2. Onsite 6 hours including 30 min lunch with Managers, engineer
Arrogant and short tempered Managers. Never heard from recruiter even after following up requesting for feedback. Never experienced this kind of behavior from mid, smaller companies in town.
I applied online. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Microsoft (Seattle, WA) in Nov 2019
Interview
I applied online for a data scientist position, I was contacted about two weeks later for a senior software engineer position instead. The interviewer was quite pleasant and helpful, and gently corrected me when I made (minor) mistakes.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
You are given a 2D image with black and white pixels (0 and 1) and a position x,y. Find the connected component (1 pixels) containing x,y.
I was also asked a couple followup questions about the disadvantages of recursion (too much memory overhead for the function calls), and how to implement my algorithm iteratively (answer: just use a stack! ...).
I applied through a recruiter. The process took 3 weeks. I interviewed at Microsoft (San Francisco, CA) in Oct 2019
Interview
The recruiter reached out to me and I scheduled a phone screen. The technical phone round was not great. I struggled to come up with a clean solution. The next day the recruiter emailed me and said that there is another team who is interested in my profile and then scheduled another technical phone round with them. This round was not good too. I did not come up with the solution I was asked. Through this whole process, the Interviewers and recruiters were very friendly and helpful. A week later the recruiter called me and said that my performance was not up to the mark and told me to contact her after 3 months after preparing some more. I was never this happy being rejected in any other interview. They really cared about the candidate and my whole experience was really good. I really think Microsoft is doing a great job making sure that the candidates don't have a negative experience. I hope one day I get to work for this awesome company.