There was a technical Skype interview followed by a series of interviews on-site. These interviews were for an entry-level university full-time position for the Oslo office in Norway. The phone interview was straight-forward, with a palindrome programming question, followed by some questions of general computer science topics (complexity, memory, etc.) in addition to some specific questions regarding my area of expertise. Within a couple of days, I received an email with the details on how to book a flight to their office for an on-site interview. The on-site interview was a little bit more thorough; each candidate underwent 3-4 interviews in a row, rotating interviewers every 45 minutes with a 5-minute break in between. Each interviewer started by asking some general, open-ended questions - not necessarily relating to programming. They told me that the interview process had recently been changed across Microsoft and that these open-ended questions were asked to gauge how the candidates think. The first two interviewers then asked some programming related questions (write a linked list in C, how does memory and resource management differ from C and garbage collected languages,) along with some discussion. Note that we were asked to program on a white board. The third interview asked a different and unexpected question about building a library (not the programming variant) that can support millions of users; what factors should you consider when building such a library (e.g. how to organize the books, how tall should the shelfs be, etc)? Note also that each interview ended by asking if I had any questions, so it would be wise not to ask every question to the first interviewer.

Expect a lengthy hiring process that can take at least two months from start to finish. In my experience, there was approximately one month of interviews followed by another month waiting for the final decision. Be prepared for a slow timeline, especially after completing all interview stages.