Microsoft Software Development Engineer In Test (SDET) Interview Questions & Reviews

Interview Details – Got an email inviting me to the first round of the interviews after college career expo. The first round was easy as long as you know your resume and show your ability of being a software developer. After about 3 weeks, they invited me to the final round on-site interview. The questions were not difficult but you have to pay attention to details.

Interview Details – Had an on campus interview where the interviewer asked some questions about a couple of things on my resume as well as the most challenging technical problem I've faced and how I solved it. I was not asked any coding questions.

Two months went by before I heard anything back from Microsoft and I was led to believe that I had been rejected since several candidates had received an invitation to interview onsite in Redmond, WA. Eventually, my recruiter told me that I had been selected to interview for an SDET role although he didn't tell me on which team (this is only communicated to you on the day of the interview). From this point on, it took another month-and-a-half or so to schedule the onsite interview in Redmond.

From this point on though, the process was smooth sailing and I received an e-mail asking to confirm travel details. The trip and itinerary was booked swiftly. On the day of the interview, I met with the onsite recruiter who told me which team I would be interviewing for as well as answered some soft/HR-type questions. I was given some suggestions/advice from the recruiter on how to approach the technical portion of the interview.

I had a day worth of onsite interviews with mostly technical questions. We went a bit overtime although I found that each interviewer was friendly and very proud of the work they were doing. They were also more than happy to answer any questions that I had as well as give feedback on my performance on the interview. The format of the interviews was a brief introduction followed by two technical questions. The first was generally on how to test a particular piece of software and the second was usually a whiteboard coding question.

After 5 interviews, I met the Hiring Manager who I feel was evaluating my 'fit' for the organization. The questions here were a mixture of technical/non-technical ones.

ADVICE:
- Although it has probably been stated elsewhere, I cannot stress the importance of knowing the following things:
    - Data Structures (Stacks, Queues, Trees, Heaps, Linked Lists, Hash Tables, etc.) as well as how the various operations on those data structures work
    - Being Able to Reason Time Complexity in code that you've written/seen (especially operations on data structures)
    - Coding on a whiteboard/without a debugger
- I would also suggest going on the internet and getting some practice with coding problems (TopCoder, CodeKata, HackerRank, Leetcode, etc. etc. etc.)

Negotiation Details – No negotiation.

Interview Details – Pretty involved process that went through about four different interviewers. Most seemed very interested in their work. Questions were okay, just get used to coding on the white board (or drawing designs on the white board).

Interview Details – The Hiring Manager contacted me based on the referal.

Instead of having a phone interview the hiring manager actually scheduled one-on-one in-person interview. The interview questions are

1. Tell me something about yourself.
2. Tell me something about your previous experiences and what was your role.
3. Why full-time position at Microsoft.
4. Why testing and not development
5. Test a vending machine which is localized for Americans.
6. How to design the testing of vending machine i.e. what is the sequence of testing's you will do. For example structure the testing process as Snack bar, buttons, coins, dispenser, power control, motor etc.
7. How would you go with automation. Which testing you would automate and which you would do manually.
8. It is a coding question: Given 2 strings write a program to find if they are anagrams are not. For example: abc and bca are 2 strings then it should return true because both strings have same length and also all the characters match each other. The count of the characters should also be same.
9. Test the above code with different types of tests.
10. The interviewer suggested to ask any questions about their team.

Later I got call from the recruiter saying they are interested in conducting a full-loop interviews. Here are the interview details

1. Implement maze functionality (Mouse should move and eat the cheese) with the following functions
• Step: Moves the mouse 1 step ahead
• Rotate: It will rotate the mouse 90 degrees.
• IsDotWall: Will return true or false based on if the wall is there.
• Is.Cheese: This needs to be called when you find out that cheese is there. It will basically exit the program.

2. Test GoTo dialog box in one of the microsoft internal applications.

3. The developer gave a small function

Public static double (string str)
{
//code
Return double;
}

Test the above thinking it as black box testing.

4. Already there is a previous version of the toaster. They are going to ship new toaster to the market. Test it.

Interview Details – phone Interview

Interview Details – Emailed resume to HR through campus recruiting, received a phone call a few days after a response to the email. The phone call was primarily a technical interview, consisting of two problem solving questions and some basic HR questions to gain the interest level for the company and position. Job position required relocation to Redmond, Washington. I wasn't aware that the position required relocation so I decided to not pursue the opportunity.

Interview Details – The process was really smooth and the recruiter a really cool person. We are friends now. Everything went well as planned. They paid all the travel and lodging expenses for the interview in person. A really good experience.
Phone and in person interview like the average technical interview but with more diverse questions. Nothing really too difficult. Typical algorithm questions + design + architecture + management questions.

Negotiation Details – It was great and really smooth as well except for the visa process. My recruiter listened to all my doubts and tried to satisfy all my requests (including salary) as much as possible.

Interview Details – 30-minute college technical screen (programming problem, test cases for it, and some basic behavioral questions), followed by 5 one hour rounds in Redmond. First two rounds with individual contributors, last three with managers with increasing level of seniority. Most rounds were in the format of solving one or two problems on the board and then writing test cases for them, except for the last round with a senior manager who also had non-technical conversation determining my fit with the company. Occasionally there was enough time left to discuss some of my projects or interests - especially during the lunch interview where this sort of conversation is particularly appropriate.

Overall a very pleasant interview experience which I was expecting from Microsoft based on reading other reviews.

Negotiation Details – Did not negotiate as the initial offer was fair based on statistics and offers from other companies.

Interview Details – A 30 min interview. The developer asked some basic background and behavior questions, like give an example of how to deal with a challenge work. Then, he asked a code problem. After the implementation of the code problem, questions related with test case were asked. Pay attention to the boundary case for an interview of SDET position. I made a mistake at first. He asked me to give solutions to correct it. Then he asked me about how to test the code.