I applied through a recruiter. I interviewed at Microsoft in Jan 2021
Interview
I had the opportunity to interview with the CSEO team during one of their Interview days. The team was very nice and engaged and I spoke with 4 individuals in 4 different teams under the CSEO's umbrella. Each one had a coding challenge that dealt with different data structures. Although I didn't receive an offer, it was a great opportunity to speak with the team. I had a wonderful recruiter helping through the process (I will say, some of the recruiters are a hit or miss, hopefully you get a good responsive individual!).
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
An example of a time you learned something new and applied it to your project.
I applied through a recruiter. The process took 2 days. I interviewed at Microsoft (Redmond, WA) in Sep 2017
Interview
The process was very scatterbrained and poorly run. The group didn't have a clear leader and their criteria of what they were looking for in an engineer shifted with every interviewer. The interview included a really awkward development test sat in front of Visual Studio coding an example solution, but there were a variety of setup problems as well as an incomplete specification of the problem that made the process slow and overcomplicated.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
The racehorse problem: given 25 horses and no stopwatch, and you can only race 5 horses at the same time, how few races does it take to find the fastest horse?
I applied through a recruiter. I interviewed at Microsoft (Seattle, WA) in Oct 2020
Interview
Had an initial technical screen followed by a virtual onsite.
A few days later I got an email from a business recruiter that Microsoft had an offer for me and requested availability to discuss the offer. After I sent the availability they did not reply to any of my emails for two weeks. After that they sent me an email that all positions were filled and they are sorry.
I reached out to the talent sourcer and they said I had cleared the interview but all positions were filled before they got to me. Then they completely ghosted me.
I did not expect this from a company like Microsoft.