I applied through college or university. The process took 3 weeks. I interviewed at Microsoft (Redmond, WA) in Dec 2010
Interview
I talked to a recruiter who set me up for an in-person one on one interview when Micrsoft recruited on campus. It took about 45 minutes and was mostly chat, except for one programming question. I was told to expect email from a recruiter within 3 weeks, and sure enough, within three weekes I was contacted by a scheduler for an onsite interview.
A day or two before the onsite, I was told which team I would be interviewing with. (I'm still rather unsatisfied with this part because I felt that I had no choice in the matter.) The onsite started out with a briefing with yet another recruiter who told me what to expect. Then I went into 4 successive interviews, each with a technical and a people skills portion. At the end of the day I met with the recruiter again to debrief. At that point, I knew better than to expect an offer because I knew I'd messed up several times early on in the interviews.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
If you're collaborating with a member of another team, how would you resolve a conflict?
I applied through college or university. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Microsoft (Redmond, WA) in Jan 2008
Interview
I interviewed as a senior in college. The interviewing process consisted of two phases for me: (1) a single on-campus interview when Microsoft visited my college campus, and (2) a day-long on-site interview at Microsoft's campus in Redmond.
The on-campus interview was with an engineer and consisted of some simple technical questions. We also talked a bit about some programming projects I had worked on at school. I believe they were looking for basic technical chops and enthusiasm for engineering.
The on-site interview consisted of one interview with an HR person and 4 interviews with engineers (two from one product/team, and two from a completely different product/team). The interview with the HR person was non-technical and focused on why I was interested in becoming an engineer. The interviews with engineers were all technical in nature. They mostly consisted of programming and algorithms questions of moderate difficulty --- the usual affair. I also had lunch at some point with one of the engineers I ended up interviewing with.
One of the technical interviews was fairly nonstandard. I was asked to come up with a design (hardware/software) for a robotic telescope. The question was very open-ended, though the interviewer of course gave some guidance. I believe the purpose of the question was to gauge the ability of the candidate to design a (real-world) system.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Describe how to design a robotic telescope. Talk about hardware (robotics/sensors); talk about software (linear algebra/control).