I applied through an employee referral. The process took 1 day. I interviewed at Microsoft (Seattle, WA) in Jun 2015
Interview
Usual rather simple programming questions pretty standard that are in every book. Nothing to add as learn data structures and how to apply them to variety of issues, computer architecture, OS specific things, some networking would help. Many groups value Linux experience a lot since it is trend to move to cloud which has lots of Linux inside
Online interview round.
There would be 4 interview rounds total. Each one evaluate various skills about you. They will give you hints as well at time required, you need to capture those and rethink on your solution.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Design worker thread library where each task will be executed in parallel. Design a system to handle a huge workload.
HR screening, one technical interview with the hiring manager then three interview loop which covered two system design and one dsa round.
System design was intensive and challenging.
It took them 5 weeks to come back with an offer. Background check was completed in a week, got joining date after 3 days.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Design a system for a startup company that let users post various types of content and get a unique url which can be shared with others to access the content