I applied through university. The process took 2 months. I interviewed at Microsoft (Monterrey, Nuevo León)
Interview
First I gave them my CV and got an answer after a week, asking me for a 1 hour phone interview in 2 weeks. I waited 2 weeks after the phone interview to get an answer asking me to assist to the final round, a face to face interview day (consisting of 4 interviews) in Monterrey, Mexico. I got the results in place one hour after the 4 interviews.
Microsoft is very well organized in their interviews and recruiters share all the information they have about you so you don't have to repeat any information. They always expect you to ask for feedback at the end of each interview and they even give you some training before the final round.
I practiced with 10+ exercises and questions that I found in Glassdoor and read the whole "Programming Interviews Exposed" book before the final round. It is very recommended if you are a student or looking for an entry level position.
I did not share all the questions that I had or the answers to them for privacy reasons.
Interview questions [4]
Question 1
You have one balance tab and 9 marbles. One of the marbles is heavier that the other 8 (which have the same weight). Having only two chances to use the balance tab, find the heaviest one.
You have one string of text and words inside are separated by a space character as usual. Given M amount and a string, return how many groups of M contiguous words can be created. For example if string was "Hello world of the United States of America" and M was 3, these would be the possible groups:
"hello world of"
"world of the"
"of the united"
"the united states"
"united states of"
"states of america"
And the only output of the algorithm would be 6.
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.
