I applied through a recruiter. The process took 3 weeks. I interviewed at Microsoft (Santa Cruz, CA) in Nov 2013
Interview
The interview started out with a bunch of broad and behavioral questions and then moved on to a technical portion with two different sections addressing the same problem. The broad questions were: Why do you want to work at Microsoft, What would you bring to Microsoft, What department do you want to work in and why, and what Microsoft technology are you interested and how would you improve it. I hadn't thought about any of these things and I was mostly doing the interview to get practice, which the interviewer picked up on immediately. Within the first ten minutes he asked me "do you really want this internship?", I was honest and the dynamic of the interview changed to him giving me helpful feedback after my crappy flustered answers. Anyway, the behavioral questions were tough (for me since I didn't prepare): what makes you better at coding then the other 15 people I am about to interview, why do you think you are qualified for this job, what is your style of writing code, why should I hire you. The technical part began with him asking me to write a function that returns the number of coins to make change for a given input value. It was very ambiguous so I asked a bunch of questions and easily got a whole lot more information. I was able to write a function that worked, making it the only section I hadn't bombed yet. I was then asked to test out a function that was supposed to do the same thing (number of coins) and figure out what was wrong with it. I was only given 5 inputs that I wasted stupidly by not putting in a currency. Needless to say I didn't do well but overall the interview was a good experience because I received a lot of helpful feedback. The interviewer was very nice and even kept me a few minutes past when the interview was over because he wanted to help me for future interviews. I felt respected and walked out of there with my dignity even though I had just looked like a fool.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Write a function that returns the number of coins needed to make change for any given input value
I applied through college or university. I interviewed at Microsoft (Bengaluru)
Interview
OA was taken, it was easy-medium consisting of a string problem and a DP problem. Technical Interview 1 was taken where they asked tree traversals using iteration and construction of trees using traversal
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Space Complexity of Traversal, also explain Morris Traversal
The entire process only had two rounds and it was really simple. Each round was around 45 minutes to an hour with a current Microsoft engineer and they just ask you a typical leetcode style question. There was also a behavioral round that was really simple.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
The first round was a typically leetcode question that was really easy. The second round was a little bit harder. It was about having a nxn square made out of 0s and 1s and it wants you to compute what the square looks like if it was rotated.
I applied online. I interviewed at Microsoft (Belgrade, Central Serbia) in Apr 2026
Interview
It was a really enjoyable experience overall. Although I didn’t get the position, the interview itself was great, and I truly appreciated the opportunity to learn more about the role, the team, and the company.
Intern applicants have rated the interview process at Microsoft with 3 out of 5 (where 5 is the highest level of difficulty) and assessed their interview experience as 71% positive. To compare, the company-average is 66.4% positive. This is according to Glassdoor user ratings.
Candidates applying for Intern roles take an average of 29 days to get hired, when considering 488 user submitted interviews for this role. To compare, the hiring process at Microsoft overall takes an average of 30 days.
Common stages of the interview process at Microsoft as a Intern according to 488 Glassdoor interviews include:
One on one interview: 33%
Phone interview: 20%
Skills test: 18%
Personality test: 6%
Presentation: 6%
Background check: 5%
IQ intelligence test: 5%
Group panel interview: 3%
Drug test: 2%
Other: 1%
Here are the most commonly searched roles for interview reports -