I applied online. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Microsoft (Bellevue, WA) in Jun 2021
Interview
Initial Teams video pre-screen "whiteboarding" a theoretical design followed by a 6-hour interview circuit with 4 1-hour interview sessions taking place on a single day. Each interviewer decides whether you're writing code or whiteboarding the solution (sometimes they give you the flexibility to pick which). Two were clear with requirements and I thought very helpful with their hints, while the other two did not present in a clear way. As always, if I had seen the particular leetcode questions ahead of the interview I'd have done much better (partially because I wouldn't need to rely on the interviewers to clarify reqs, etc.). They were all what I would classify as "leetcode medium" questions.
I feel that doing these interviews with MSFT and AMZN and others is a decent way to prepare as I haven't really seen technical interviews that were harder than those from MSFT and AMZN, however you really have to grind for several months (after work) or a few weeks (not holding down a full time job) at least to clear enough of these potential leetcode problems to where you will have seen (ideally) all of them already when you get into the interview. That's always been my gripe with these intervews- anyone who passes them has probably completed the same basic problem on HackerRank and it's not "really" a test of coding ability so much as it's a test of memory.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Each interviewer is supposed to cover one or two of Microsoft's core values- they ask a question to give you the opportunity to describe something about your work history that demonstrates the core value/core values. In practice only around half asked these kinds of non-technical questions.
Started with a recruiter phone call and a 30 minute phone call with the hiring manager to negotiate a remote role since the job was based in Seattle and the manager agreed. Following up with five rounds of virtual on site. Four of them are coding/design. One of them is behavioral mostly leetcode medium level questions which I finished and I was able to do all the follow up and answer the design and time complexity questions correctly after the interview got ghosted for a whole month and got an automatic rejection email.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Leet code medium level questions. DFS, BFS, sliding windows and greedy algorithm. Follow up, asking some design questions and the time complexity of the code.
Phone interview with hiring manager for 45 minutes primarily a tech interview. Focused on questions directly related to tech stack. Come prepared knowing design questions and how those conversations go.
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