Me postulé a través de un reclutador. El proceso tomó 2 semanas. Acudí a una entrevista en Microsoft (Redmond, WA) en jun 2015
Entrevista
Got a call from the recruiter, who setup a phone screen with one of the members of the hiring team. That process took about a week
After clearing the tech screen I was invited onsite for a round of interviews , the entire process took about 2 weeks
Round 1 - Dynamic programming and the interviewer doesn't acknowledge the concept of using an array of 256 characters and wants me to throw in the phrase "we will use a Hashmap". A question which if solved genuinely takes a few hours and cannot be finished and tested in 40 mins unless we are copying it from leetcode
Round 2 - Design the game of boggle and return a list of all the words that are of length 3 or more, i gave the recursive solution by the end but the interviewer is looking for a better solution ( recursive but less lines of code), a question which cannot be coded and tested in 40 mins
Round 3 - What is a binary search tree ? why do we use them ? Write code to check if a given binary tree is a binary search tree ( gave the solution using in-order traversal but the interviewer thinks that the code is hard to read and isn't maintainable and writes a line of code using the Enumerable class of C#
He then goes on for 30 minutes on a NP complete problem and did not have a clear idea of what he was asking, " we use constraints" and "these are problems open discussions" were the 2 phrases iterated throughout
A negative experience
Me postulé en línea. Acudí a una entrevista en Microsoft en may 2026
Entrevista
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.