I applied through college or university. The process took 2 months. I interviewed at Microsoft in Dec 2014
Interview
Was contacted by campus recruiter after handing in my resume during an info session. Had an on-campus interview and was asked 1 technical question involving linked list (very simple), and stuff on my resume. A month or so later, I was emailed regarding planning for my trip to Redmond for the final round of interviews. Great experience, had 4 interviews in Redmond. The interview problems were very basic, involving first year data structures and algorithms. Was contacted about offer about 1 week later.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Develop a function to draw a n-ary tree, with each set of subtrees being centered on its root, recursively.
The process took 3 weeks. I interviewed at Microsoft
Interview
Microsoft came to campus and I spoke with them. Within a week I had a phone interview with a FT SDE. We talked about me and some of my experience and interests. I was then given a technical question.
I week later I was told I was selected for a final round on-site interview. That consisted of four back-to-back 45 minute interviews. These consisted of behavioral questions and one technical question each. They were challenging but not impossible.
A few days later I received an offer and accepted
I applied through a recruiter. I interviewed at Microsoft in Oct 2014
Interview
The process was extremely well organized, requiring minimal effort for the interviewee. Flights were arranged as well as land travel to get to the hotel and interview location in Washington. For the actual interviews, four one-on-one interviews were held very early in the morning, since they needed to fit in two sessions in one day. My session went from 8am to 12pm, while the second session went from 1pm to 5pm. Each interview was a pretty standard technical interview that lasted 50 minutes. Questions were very technical and heavy on algorithms, but nothing out of the ordinary for software engineering interviews. The recruiters were very consistent in making you feel comfortable and answering any questions in between the interviews. They were clear and accurate about when results would be given for how the interviews went, which in my case was just two days.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Given a number range, create a function that takes the total count of numbers whose individual digits add up to a second number provided as a parameter to the function.