I just finished the Microsoft interview loop and ended up with an offer, so I'm writing down what worked best for me. I'm a software engineer, mostly backend work and distributed services, though never at a big tech company.
The process looked a lot like what other companies do, with one difference: there was no recruiter screen. After the online assessment I was sent straight to the onsite. That loop had several coding interviews, one conversation about system design and architecture, and some behavioral questions on how I work with other people.
The coding rounds cared mostly about how I solved the problem, which data structures I picked, and whether my thinking was clear, not only whether I reached the final answer. For one palindrome problem I ran out of time before I could run all the tests. The interviewer was fine with it anyway, because I had walked through my approach, the tradeoffs and the edge cases while coding. That told me that talking through your work matters a lot.
Preparation made the biggest difference. What mattered most was being steady and deliberate, and sticking to the basics instead of chasing the hardest problems I could find. I started with an online crash course on interview patterns to get up to speed, then practiced on several different sites so I would see the same core idea worded in different ways. After a while I wasn't memorizing questions anymore, I was spotting the pattern behind them.
My last piece of advice is to stay calm. In my early interviews I got very nervous because I didn't know what to expect, and that hurt me more than the actual difficulty of the questions. It helped to treat each interview as two people solving a problem together rather than an exam. Ask clarifying questions, think out loud, and remember the interviewer wants to see how you reason, not a perfect result.
If you're preparing right now, it's very doable if you stay consistent. Work on fundamentals, practice explaining your thoughts out loud, and don't let a bad day discourage you, because they come with the process.
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