I applied through college or university. The process took 3 weeks. I interviewed at Microsoft (Redmond, WA) in Dec 2011
Interview
Microsoft came to our campus and shortlisted candidates based on the resumes they submitted. They held brief face to face (~30 mins) interviews in campus over 2 days.
I was asked about my educational background, my thesis, research and open ended questions such as:
1. Give a few examples of scenarios where distributed computing could be applied and would be useful.
2. Tell me about a time when you were faced with a difficult problem you couldn't solve.
3. Why is finding a bug in a multiprocessor programming harder than in sequential programming? How would you solve this problem?
Next they flew me to Redmond for a day full of one on one interviews (5 in total, 4 technical 1 HR in the end). They took care of accommodation, travel, etc and made me feel very comfortable.
The people were very nice and friendly.
Interview questions [5]
Question 1
Write a function to add content to an XML file at an appropriate place every time a certain type of HTTP request is made. Since the server is serving multiple HTTP requests in parallel using threads, the solution should account for that.
N people are sitting in a circle labelled 1 through n. They being counting 1,2,3,.... in a clockwise manner and every person that gets a number divisible by 3 is eliminated. Write a program to figure out which numbered person will remain. What's the time and space complexity?
Questions on object oriented programming concepts such as polymorphism, multiple inheritance, and virtual functions.
Model the animals in a zoo and draw the class diagrams. Questions regarding when it's right to inherit from a class as opposed to adding a property in the current class, and so on. When to use multiple inheritance, which classes should be abstract, etc.
Implement a solution to the shortest path problem in a weighted directed graph. (Obviously, the question wasn't framed like this, they gave me a map of cities with distances and asked how to get from city A to city B with the smallest distance traveled, and then to write code for it)
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.
