I applied through a recruiter. The process took 2 months. I interviewed at Microsoft (Waterloo, ON) in Oct 2014
Interview
One on-campus interview scheduled by the designated university recruiter. Interviewed with a manager that was flown in to do technical interviews for a day on-campus.
After passing this, there was a fly-out to Redmond (The Microsoft Experience). This was tons of fun and was almost like a mini-vacation but also nerve-wracking. There are so many people flying in every day of the week so there are many people to share the experience with. The interview day lasts the entire day and consists typically of five interviews 1.5 hours each including a lunch interview. A new recruiter helps take care of logistics for the fly-out.
A different recruiter takes care of you for the whole day. They meet at the beginning and end to ensure you have the experience you are looking for. This recruiter makes contact directly about the result of the interviews soon after.
Interview questions [3]
Question 1
An owner of a private island wants to land a plane. The longest stretch on his island is 0.5 mile. The plane needs one mile to land. You work at the engineering firm he contracts to help solve this problem for him. What do you do?
I applied online. I interviewed at Microsoft in May 2026
Interview
1. Recruiter screen: recruiter was friendly but had their camera off. They asked me about my recent work experience, my strongest programming language, and salary expectations
2. Technical Screen: live HackerRank coding challenge with a team member of the team hiring for the role, over Microsoft Teams. The interviewer had their camera off but was easy to talk to. The coding challenge was a LeetCode-style challenge that required the backtracking algorithm. Interviewer spent extra time aftwards to take questions from me and share information about the team and employer.
3. 3x "Full Loop Interview Technical". The interviewers did not show up to these interviews. I emailed the recruiter who told me that interviewing for the role had been cancelled.
My overall impression of Microsoft based on their hiring practises is the company is dysfunctional, employees are disengaged, their hiring practises are disconnected from the actual job, and they don't care about candidate experience.
Moderate. Do leetcode tagged Microsoft questions. They generally ask from most recent Microsoft tagged questions. I applied without referral. Will have a technical screening with hiring manager. Then DSA and System design rounds.
Interview process:
Online assessment (hard level)
1-hour screening call
4 interviews in one day:
Medium-hard LeetCode (OOP-focused)
Medium-hard LeetCode DSA problem
Long system design interview (strong focus on relational database design)
Partner manager interview (AI-focused + behavioral)
The process was technically challenging and well-structured.
However, after the final interview, there was over one month of silence despite follow-up messages. Eventually, I received a generic rejection email stating:
"This decision does not reflect on your potential or the value of your experience."
I would have appreciated more timely communication and more specific feedback after such an extensive process.