Microsoft Interview Questions & Reviews in Seattle, WA Area
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Updated Feb 14, 2012 – Interview questions and reviews posted anonymously by interview candidates.
Ratings are reflective of location and job title.
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Difficulty Rating [?] Based on 490 ratings 
“Average” Interview
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Interview Experience [?] Based on 490 ratings
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| 41–50 of 486 Microsoft Interviews | Sort by |
Software Development Engineer Intern at Microsoft
Posted Dec 19, 2011
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4.0
Difficult Interview
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Overall Positive Experience
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Interviewed and No Offer
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Interviewed Dec 2011 in Seattle, WA (took 4+ weeks)
Did one interview at my university. Went to Seattle and had 4 on-site interviews.
Interview Questions
Other Details
I got the interview through an Employee Referral and the interview consisted of a 1:1 Interview.
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Helpful Interview?
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Software Development Engineer at Microsoft
Posted Dec 12, 2011 — 2 of 3 people found this helpful
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4.0
Difficult Interview
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Overall Neutral Experience
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Interviewed and No Offer
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Interviewed Dec 2011 in Bellevue, WA (took a day)
Applied through the Microsoft website and interviewed on-campus. I was pleased to hear that I was selected to be flown up to Seattle and interview with the online services division (Bellevue, WA not Redmond). I will state early on that I completed the interview process and received no offer - however, with that said, I will be as objective as I can be about the experience.
Firstly, understand that although Microsoft does every single thing possible to try to show how "fun" they are, by far the number one thing the interviewers look for is the ability to think and code just like any other large software company. Everyone who says that it's important to be social and personable at Microsoft must have interviewed with a different division. With online services, all that matters is coding, problem solving, and wanting to tackle new problems.
During your day you will have four 45 minute interviews, with 15 minute breaks in between. After that you will hear immediately whether or not an offer will be extended. This is absolutely amazing by Microsoft. To have that feedback so instantaneously is incredible and truly first-class of the company. These interviews will be intimidating to say the least and I can virtually guarantee you that you will run into one or two people that you really like and think are cool, and one or two that make you second-guess if you really want to work there.
Each interview has a coding question. My four were as follows:
1) Given the in-order and preorder traversals of a binary tree, rebuild the tree.
2) Given a sparse n-by-m matrix, find the number of distinct paths within that matrix (each cell can be off or on, find the number of distinct sets of connected cells).
3) Given the Android 3x3 matrix lock screen, generate all the possible unlock combinations that one can enter.
4) Given an array of integers, find all the unique elements.
I botched the first question. It was 8AM in the morning when I attempted it and I had been up since 6:30. To be quite honest, I had forgotten to review the tree algorithms. I met with the interviewer and he literally bombarded me with questions. If you say *anything* be prepared to defend it and back it up. There is also a strong sense that you must be very, very interested in working for Microsoft. As one Microsoftie put it, "the people who work at Microsoft choose to work there because they love Microsoft, it's not that they cannot work for Google or Apple".
There is little to no review of your resume. The emphasis is pretty much solely on your ability to code relatively generic, albeit challenging, programming problems. This can work to your advantage or it can be a disadvantage. To ace the interview, simply read a number of programming problems and study up on the division you are interested in. At one point in time, I was asked: "if you were given a farm of 1000 computers, say, what problem would you try to solve?". Find something that Microsoft is trying to solve, or some generic problem in the division for whom you are interviewing.
As I was not extended the offer, I cannot precisely tell you what it takes to succeed in the interview. However, here are a couple of observations I made (some of which are listed earlier):
1) Read up on the division for whom you are interviewing and understand their business well.
2) Read up on many, many coding questions. If you read enough problems, chances are you will have heard a problem similar to the one you are trying to solve.
3) I cannot stress this enough, but to succeed you *must* ace the first interview you have. I told you how I botched the first question. I did not think to use recursion. In a later interview I had a question that could have used recursion (implementing a BFS), but I chose the iterative process. The interviewer remarked to me, "your first interviewer noted that you don't use recursion, why don't you?". These interviewers talk to each other in between! As such, you must absolutely make a good first impression.
If you can interview with Microsoft, it is a cool experience. You get two free nights in a nice hotel room and all your expenses paid. It makes for an awesome trip to Seattle. However, I really wish Microsoft would cut down on the number of people they bring to Seattle. Reading through Glassdoor, you will see *a lot* of people are not extended offers. Why bring these people if you don't extend a great deal of offers? I feel their current system unfairly generates a lot of false hopes.
If you are interviewing with the big M, I wish you the best. You will have a fun experience and it will be really cool to even just walk through those doors once. As the guy who told me the sad end-of-day news put it, "we receive 10,000 resumes a week, and the fact that you made it this far attests to your skills". Be proud that you received the interview and enjoy your experience!
Interview Questions
Other Details
I got the interview through a College or University and the interview consisted of a Phone Interview and a 1:1 Interview.
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Software Development Engineer Intern at Microsoft
Posted Dec 12, 2011
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3.0
Average Interview
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Overall Positive Experience
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Received and Accepted Offer
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Interviewed Dec 2010 in Redmond, WA (took 2 months)
Went to an on campus screening section, then got an offer to fly down to Redmond for the interview. Since it's a big recruiting event for the on site interview, we had a big party (hosted and paid for by MS) the night before the interview at a bowling place with unlimited free food and (alcoholic) drinks. Did 4-5 back-to-back 1:1 interviews with the hiring managers and met with the recruiter that afternoon and was told that I received an offer.
Interview Questions
Other Details
I got the interview through a College or University and the interview consisted of a Phone Interview, a 1:1 Interview and a Skills Test.
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Program Manager Intern at Microsoft
Posted Dec 10, 2011
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4.0
Difficult Interview
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Overall Neutral Experience
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Interviewed and No Offer
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Interviewed Nov 2011 in Redmond, WA (took 4+ weeks)
I submitted my Resume at a Career Fair and got contacted by a recruiter to do a phone screen. That was all business as usual. I then got invited out to the Microsoft campus to do a series of interviews (I was told between 3-5 for intern interviews). All expenses paid, etc.
Overall pretty solid. Third interview was the hardest and I think is the one that prevented me from getting an offer.
Fourth interview asked me a lot of questions related to vision/the future which I thought was interesting. Unfortunately, she only gave me a little over half the time of a regular interview because she had to go to a meeting or something. Unfortunate and frustrating because I felt rushed and don't think I was able to fully make up my lackluster performance from the third interview.
Interview Questions
Other Details
I got the interview through a College or University and the interview consisted of a Phone Interview and a 1:1 Interview.
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Software Development Engineer In Test (SDET) at Microsoft
Posted Dec 10, 2011
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3.0
Average Interview
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Overall Positive Experience
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Received and Accepted Offer
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Interviewed Nov 2011 in Redmond, WA (took 2 weeks)
My resume was forwarded to this group through a friend. The recruiter got in touch to schedule a phone screen. They scheduled an additional one.
First one focused on a string manipulation question and basic computer science, and OO concepts (stuff like threading basics, polymorphism). Also asked about work experience.
Second one focused a lot more on my understanding of memory allocation - had to point out challenges/errors on a given custom memory allocator. And another question was an array-of-integers-related question.
Was called onsite a week later. Had 5 rounds of interviews.
Questions based on a mix of understanding of Computer science concepts—such as multi-threading, client-server behavior, http basics, scalability etc—and algorithms/coding as well as testing ability.
Some of the coding related questions: reversal of sentence, sorting an array based on its modulo 'k' value, a 2-D array sorting related question.
I got the offer a week later and accepted it.
Interview Questions
Negotiation Details
Wasn't able to negotiate but the offer was to my expectations.
Advice: don't discuss salary prior to the interview process. Politely decline to set expectations as much as possible.
Other Details
I got the interview through an Employee Referral and the interview consisted of a Phone Interview, a 1:1 Interview and a Background Check.
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Program Manager at Microsoft
Posted Dec 9, 2011
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4.0
Difficult Interview
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Overall Neutral Experience
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Received and Accepted Offer
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Interviewed May 2011 in Bellevue, WA (took 2 days)
First round interview on campus after resume screening. I did well (he said "Wow" to my answers). Role playing: interviewer pretended to be an engineer and proposed a design solution to a problem, and told me to be the program manager and respond. Asked about how I would define metrics to measure for X and Y.
On site interview, asked to design X, optimize Y, come up with how X would be different as you moved from one hardware platform to another.
The hiring manager who ended up hiring me, I didn't like, so I requested that I have one of the other interviewers be my manager, and they were willing to fulfill that request.
Interview Questions
Negotiation Details
Presumed Interns don't really have any negotiating power as it's a well defined program (over 1,000 interns per summer)
Other Details
The interview consisted of a 1:1 Interview, a Skills Test and a Background Check.
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Engineering Service Engineer II at Microsoft
Posted Dec 8, 2011
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4.0
Difficult Interview
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Overall Negative Experience
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Interviewed and No Offer
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Interviewed Nov 2011 in Bellevue, WA (took 2 days)
If your application passes technical screening, you meet for an informational with the hiring manager. If that goes well, you meet with some of the team on an ad hoc basis. If that goes well, you are asked back for a "gauntlet" style interview.
On the day of the second interview, you meet with the HR recruiter handling your application, they give you the tentative schedule for the day including the first two interviewers. All other interviewers in the loop are included on an "as needed" basis, which means that after the first two, you're either asked to continue or asked to leave. Next interviewer, then another "as needed" or bye-bye. The 4th person you interview with will be your prospective manager's manager. If you make it that far, you're doing well. There's a 5th "as needed" person that will be your manager's manager's manager.
I made it to the 4th interviewer, and was told that the 5th "as needed" person was booked solid and couldn't make it. This was a polite way of saying "we'll call you". The HR recruiter called me within the week to let me know that I was being marked as "hire for MS, no hire for the position" which means I'm not blackballed, just not going to get this specific job, so keep applying.
Interviewers don't always focus on what your role will be. The position I applied for was supposedly a "Service Engineering" role, but 2 of my 4 interviewers were senior dev leads asking me a bunch of dev-related questions. "Show me how you'd identify a problem with this service using C# or Powershell." Not just conceptual "well I'd do this, and this and this", but writing it out on a whiteboard in pseudo-code, how you would actually accomplish each task on systems you know next to nothing about and in environments with untold ambiguities. Clarifying questions are a MUST.
My answers must not have been satisfactory, or perhaps required too much "guiding" (aka clarifying). It did not help that English was a second or third language for these two interviewers. When I gave puzzled looks because I had no clue what they just said, did they interpret that to mean I didn't understand the problem or didn't know how to solve it? These kinds of challenges will abound. Next time I will say clearly that I'm having a hard time with their accent (politely, of course).
Microsoft doesn't do the "if you were the size of a nickel and trapped in a blender...." type questions any more unless you're applying in a group you probably don't want to join anyways.
I'm rating my experience as Negative, not because I didn't get the position, but because the two devs that interviewed me for a non-dev role were added ad hoc to the interview in lieu of two people who were scheduled to interview me but were out "sick" (my interview took place the Monday after Thanksgiving weekend).
Other than those factors (which I think tanked my chances significantly), it was positive overall.
Interview Questions
Other Details
I Applied Online and the interview consisted of a 1:1 Interview, a Group/Panel Interview and a Background Check.
Helpful Interview?
Yes |
No
Inappropriate?
Software Development Engineer In Test (SDET) II at Microsoft
Posted Dec 7, 2011
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3.0
Average Interview
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Overall Positive Experience
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Interviewed and No Offer
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Interviewed Dec 2011 in Bellevue, WA (took 2 days)
Live Meeting
Interview Questions
string funcReplaceStr(string inputStr, string compareStr, string replaceStr)
2) Design a normalized datastore and t-sql for getting this problem: Get me the top 10 customers who have purchased the most products from my site.
Other Details
I got the interview through a Recruiter and the interview consisted of a 1:1 Interview.
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Software Development Engineer In Test (SDET) at Microsoft
Posted Dec 2, 2011
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5.0
Very Difficult Interview
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Overall Positive Experience
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Interviewed and No Offer
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Interviewed Oct 2010 in Redmond, WA (took 2 days)
I was initially contacted by an MS recruiter who had found articles on my blog related to a skills they were currently hiring from.
I had an initial phone screen with the recruiter, followed by a phone interview with a test manager a few days later. The phone screen consisted of basic coding tests done via live meeting.
A few weeks later I visited the Redmond campus for a series of in-person interviews with several other test engineers. The interview series consisted of 4 - 5 in-person interviews, each with a single test engineer, each consisting of either coding on a whiteboard or testing applications. The interviews progressed in difficulty as the day went on.
Interview Questions
Given the signature above, implement the simplest method that returns the results of the following arguments:
1. “3+5” (8)
2. “10+2-8” (4)
3. “5+10*3” (35)
4. “3+5--6" (14)
Other Details
I got the interview through a Recruiter and the interview consisted of a Phone Interview and a 1:1 Interview.
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Program Manager at Microsoft
Posted Dec 2, 2011
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3.0
Average Interview
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Overall Negative Experience
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Interviewed and No Offer
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Interviewed Nov 2011 in Seattle, WA (took 3 weeks)
I was set up with the interview through my school recruiter, who asked me to fill out a preference sheet (indicating what areas of interest, front end, back end, etc.). When I arrived on the MS campus, I found out I was interviewing for nothing I'd preferenced. When the interviewers asked me what I was interested in, I was honest. It didn't align with their work and on my third interview my interviewer told me I was a good candidate but not for that team. I was very thrown off by this and he wouldn't let me talk about it any more. He also said he was my last interview, but when I was waiting for the shuttle my fourth interviewer came to get me. It seemed very disorganized. The questions weren't hard, but it seemed like I was set up for failure from the beginning. I was disappointed to have such a bad/pointless experience because I've always heard how good the MS interviews are. I wasn't impressed. Microsoft is very generous and takes care of all travel arrangements, so that was very nice. Another thing that turned me off... I found a manager publicly tweeting about how I wasn't a good candidate. Not professional
Interview Questions
Other Details
I got the interview through a College or University and the interview consisted of a Phone Interview and a 1:1 Interview.
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