About me and the position:
Status: Incoming Junior, BS CS, Top 100 CS School (US News)
Position: 2022 SDE Intern at Microsoft
Location: Redmond, WA
Date: Summer 2022About the interview process:
7/14 - Applied to this job posting with a referral (day after it opened lol)
8/5 - Received interview for initial recruiter phone screen
8/12 - Completed initial phone screen (no codility, just a phone call). Google "github CourtneyThurston microsoft internships", it helped me ace the phone interview.
8/27 - Received invite for final interviews.
9/10 - Completed 2 x 45 min final interviews. Each had a couple of behaviorals and 1 technical question. LC Microsoft explore card is good prep, I got no more than LC med. Behavorial questions tied into stuff on my resume, so make sure you know every single thing you have there.
I got through all of the implementation and analysis during my first interview, and felt really good about it. The question relied heavily on understanding how to get unicode representations of "a-z" and "A-Z", in Python basically useing the ord() and chr() functions.
During the second interview, I only drew up a game plan and analyzed my algo, but had back and forth with the interviewer about small improvements until I had written out pseudocode of the optimal solution. Left that second interview feeling okay-ish. The question was a weird graph question with a spin on BFS/DFS. Just understanding those algos was enough for me to write and analyze all potential answers.
9/17 - Offer extended. The action center portal for interviews changed to "completed" under a new job number, offer was received midday
Thoughts about interviewing with Microsoft:
Definitely an enjoyable company to interview with. The recruiters were very responsive and accomodating, and every interviewer was on time and really kind.
I reneged an Amazon internship for next summer solely because of how great Microsoft was through this process. I believe both companies would be great places to intern and learn, but I am at a point in my life where I highly value how an employer treats me.