First, I gave them my CV and received an answer after a week, asking me for a 1-hour phone interview in two weeks. I waited two weeks after the phone interview to get an answer asking me to attend the final round, a face-to-face interview day (consisting of four interviews) in Monterrey, Mexico. I received the results on-site one hour after the four interviews.

Microsoft is very well organized in its interviews, and recruiters share all the information they have about you, so you don't have to repeat any information. They always expect you to ask for feedback at the end of each interview, and they even provide training before the final round.

I practiced with 10+ exercises and questions that I found on Glassdoor and read the whole "Programming Interviews Exposed" book before the final round. It is highly recommended if you are a student or looking for an entry-level position.

I did not share all the questions I had or the answers to them for privacy reasons.

You have one balance scale and 9 marbles. One of the marbles is heavier than the other 8, which have the same weight. Having only two chances to use the balance scale, find the heaviest one.

Test the Windows face authentication system.

Algorithm to search a word in a document.

You have one string of text, with words separated by a space character as usual. Given an amount M and a string, return how many groups of M contiguous words can be created. For example, if the string was "Hello world of the United States of America" and M was 3, these would be the possible groups:

• "hello world of"
• "world of the"
• "of the united"
• "the united states"
• "united states of"
• "states of america"

The only output of the algorithm would be 6.