I applied through an employee referral. The process took 2 days. I interviewed at Microsoft (Durham, NC) in Jun 2015
Interview
Met individually for 30 min with 4 people. They asked a series of problem solving and coding exercises. There was very little tell me about your experience or why would you be a good fit.
I applied online. The process took 12 months. I interviewed at Microsoft (Redmond, WA) in Nov 2019
Interview
1. Technical screening with hiring manager
2. Onsite 6 hours including 30 min lunch with Managers, engineer
Arrogant and short tempered Managers. Never heard from recruiter even after following up requesting for feedback. Never experienced this kind of behavior from mid, smaller companies in town.
I applied online. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Microsoft (Seattle, WA) in Nov 2019
Interview
I applied online for a data scientist position, I was contacted about two weeks later for a senior software engineer position instead. The interviewer was quite pleasant and helpful, and gently corrected me when I made (minor) mistakes.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
You are given a 2D image with black and white pixels (0 and 1) and a position x,y. Find the connected component (1 pixels) containing x,y.
I was also asked a couple followup questions about the disadvantages of recursion (too much memory overhead for the function calls), and how to implement my algorithm iteratively (answer: just use a stack! ...).