I'm an international student in USA. I applied for this job through one of my friends and I got the interview. It took 3 weeks to be called as they were investigating whether they can offer me this full-time job (because of F1 visa and the effort needs for it to be changed to H1b). My interview was at 2:00pm pacific time and I was called on time. I was interviewed 38min as:
a) Warm up:
1. First 15min: I was asked about my university and my study more on my visa status and what I would do if I get accepted. I was also asked about whether I liked to move out to Seattle and so on.
I answered the questions well. I had done some research about the University of Washington and some on google map so I knew about my options and how I would continue my study and work at the same time at Microsoft. Moreover, I talked about the different USA visa types and their options to work and so far.
2. 5min: The second question was about whether I like to work as a developer or as an Qa.
I answered that I would love to work as an QA and get some more experience in that field. I also added that I had been working as a developer so I would be more experienced as a software developer but I like to work in QA team and I know about what they do and their responsibilities.
b) Technical Interview
1. SQL Problem: The problem was about this Employee table in SQL with four columns:
Name(string, PK), Alias(string, Unique), Phone(string, NULL), ManagerAlias(string, FK)
I was asked about three different questions:
1.1. Finding an employee's manager
1.2. Finding a manager's employees
1.3. Finding the all employees under on manager
2. The second question was a testing question about a function in which I should validate a Tic Tac Toe game. The input is a snapshot of the game and the output should be whether the game is correct or not.
Answer: I could choose my ideal data structure for the snapshop so I chose 2-dimension character array.
Test Cases: two players have won, either x or o has won, the game has already finished.
3. The third question was about what XSS is.
I was passed technically but I was rejected as they said that I wasn't motivated enough. The problem was that I didn't care to be in QA team or the development team so they interviewer thought that I am not motivated for being in Microsoft.
Overall, the interview was great, I couldn't understand from my interviewer's voice whether I was doing good or not but I was so confident about myself and I tried to answer with reasons. I tried to think loud so I could let the other side know that even if I am answering wrong, I know the differences between view, stored procedures, local table variables, and cursors.
