I was contacted by phone and email two months after applying online and through campus recruiting. The phone interview consisted of fairly basic data structure questions involving stacks, queues, and concepts like bucket sort. I was surprised by how tailored to my resume all of the other questions were, though. So, make sure you know everything you put on your resume well enough to speak strongly about it. I made this mistake, but it was apparently minor enough, as I was invited for on-site interviews.

I flew out to Seattle within two weeks of my phone interview. We stayed in the commons and hung out with a large group (over 40) of other applicants for various positions, mostly SDE interns. It was pretty neat as we got to ride a party bus to the campus. The waiting room for all the interns was very nice, featuring a large touchscreen TV for Fruit Ninja, another large surface table for other minigames, and catered snacks and drinks.

I was an afternoon interviewee, so we went to lunch first. The Microsoft lunch area is very nice. We received a $10 voucher for any restaurant-type establishment. Everything had a bit of an upscale mall food court feel, in a good way. Drinks were also free for all employees, which is cool.

I was interviewing for a position in MSIT, which comprises Microsoft's internal tooling software teams, such as the enterprise e-commerce division and others. There were three technical interviews, which were equal parts conversational and coding, and one completely conversational job fit interview. Again, my resume topics were discussed quite a bit more than I expected.

My interviewers were very interested in projects I had worked on in groups and the broad design choices we had made, so if you have any, be ready to speak to them.

The interviews went well enough, though I think I choked in the last technical interview. They gradually increase the difficulty of your solutions by adding restrictions like runtime and allowed data structures. It got to a point where I simply didn't have an answer, but that might be what they're looking for.

Two business days later, I got a call with an offer from my recruiter for an SDE position. The base salary was slightly lower than the average, but I suspect they're including at least part of the very generous benefits package that Microsoft provides.

Lots of string manipulation and conceptual OOP questions.

Wasn't expecting that, based on the frequency of graph/tree questions that I felt was more the norm from other internship interview reviews.