I applied through a recruiter. The process took 2 days. I interviewed at Microsoft (Redmond, WA) in Sep 2017
Interview
The process was very scatterbrained and poorly run. The group didn't have a clear leader and their criteria of what they were looking for in an engineer shifted with every interviewer. The interview included a really awkward development test sat in front of Visual Studio coding an example solution, but there were a variety of setup problems as well as an incomplete specification of the problem that made the process slow and overcomplicated.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
The racehorse problem: given 25 horses and no stopwatch, and you can only race 5 horses at the same time, how few races does it take to find the fastest horse?
HR screening, one technical interview with the hiring manager then three interview loop which covered two system design and one dsa round.
System design was intensive and challenging.
It took them 5 weeks to come back with an offer. Background check was completed in a week, got joining date after 3 days.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Design a system for a startup company that let users post various types of content and get a unique url which can be shared with others to access the content
I applied online. I interviewed at Microsoft (Bengaluru) in Jun 2026
Interview
I got call via microsoft HR. She informed there will be 4 rounds of technical interviews all eliminator. Round 1 interview was a mid level graph question. The interviewer was actively involved, understood my logic, approach, challneged my assumeptions, did a dryrun at end, good experience. Round 2 inteviewer was extremely lazy and passive. It was a bad experience. He gave a problem statement of sliding window and disappeared. Wasn't intrested in hearing approach or even reading code. He came after 30 minutes , did a dry run and final output wasn't exactly correct. I identified a logical bug and started correcting it. He said there is no need , just finished the interview after that. The code i had written was optimal code but he didn't care to read that also. And there was still 20 minutes left. It gave me impression that interviewer in not at all interested in taking interview and they have been pushed my management. HR called next day to say i am not selected.