I applied through a recruiter. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Microsoft (Seattle, WA) in Oct 2015
Interview
This was for the Hololens team.
Got the job via a head hunter from Seattle area from the company "Experis IT".
He managed to screw up the whole interview with the project lead of the holo lens team in Microsoft.
Microsoft constantly uses third-party recruiting agencies to get their people. These agencies will only take Canadian citizens and will not sponsor you for any visa if you require one.
The interview was 1st telephonic and then I was an international candidate going from Vancouver to Seattle. The recruiting agency nor microsoft paid for my travel to the interview which was the 2nd round, in person. This was a white board question (question details below).
The interviewers were in a haste and didn't actually know about my interview. I was left in the lobby for 1.15 hour with no food or water, since I was just an interviewee.
I had travelled by train from Vancouver (Canada) to Seattle for a 1 hour whiteboard test which Microsoft was strict about. In total I travel-led 17 hours for a 1 hour interview with Microsoft and it was horrible.
I advice that whoever goes to such interviews from Canada to US, ask all details to the original head hunting agencies like:
1. How many rounds will the interview be.
2. How much commission will be cut from your salary (yes commission is taken from the employee's salary on a monthly basis)
3. You are mostly underpaid compared to what normal US citizens are paid.
4. If its a contract to hire, its a risk, what can the recruiting agency do to resolve Visa issues.
5. Search W2- Payroll.
Hope it helps. This is a Game Dev / related position using game engine.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Check whether a piece on a chess board can move from A to B. The function should return "True or False" if the move is possible. Test cases can range from Pawn to Bishop or any other piece. You have to know or calculate how a piece would travel, intersect a path , kill an opponent between A and B.
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.