I applied through college or university. The process took 1 day. I interviewed at Microsoft (Hyderabad) in Jan 2010
Interview
Microsoft IT, Hyderabad came on my college campus providing internship to selected students. A quick elimination in written test was followed by 4 rounds of interview ( 3 tech + 1 hr).
Interview for college students is not herculean hard. Stick to basics - data structures, OS, OOP, databases. Be sure that you know A-Z of everything you mentioned on your resume.
I did get selected as an intern for 8 weeks at MS IT, Hyd. The work culture is awesome, with all the perks you can wish for including pool tables, tt, free beverages and such. The people of team that I joined were supportive and the work cut out for me was definitive. So just worry on how to get there, and not on what will you do once you are there.
Interview questions [5]
Question 1
You have a machine that can create anything. You just have to specify the details, and voila, it will give you the output. Design test cases for such a machine
Two airline companies, Kingfisher and Jet airways want to do a merger. Design a database migration scheme, so that no inconsistencies and redundancy occur. Assume suitable data and brief on the problems you might face.
Problem of concurrent transactions done by two persons of a joint account at two different ATM Machines. How is it managed without introducing any inconsistency in balance of the account holders?
The process took 1 day. I interviewed at Microsoft (Pekín, Pekín) in Sep 2009
Interview
I was asked about some detailed knowledge of hardware, such as the setup time, hold time, and the bandwidth of PCIe 16x. Also they were pretty interested in my past projects. I described the reasons and mechanisms in general. Because I knew this group for a while and had some offline contact, I didn't get too much trouble at the interview.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Explain the setup time, hold time of digital circuit and their effect on the overall frequency.
The process took 3 weeks. I interviewed at Microsoft (Haifa) in Jun 2008
Interview
The hiring process consisted of 3 personal interviews with developers of different managerial levels. The first 2 interviews were purely technical and the third was also personal. In my case the third was also the only one where they insisted that I write long C++ code on the blackboard and find my own syntax errors.