Microsoft Software Development Engineer Intern Interview Questions & Reviews

Interview Details – one on campus interview and followed with 4 interviews after 2 weeks

Negotiation Details – No negotiation.

Interview Details – I submitted my resume at a career fair. I was subsequently invited to an on-campus interview with a recruiter who had previously worked as a PM. The interview was non-technical; he only asked about my previous work and which of the three internship types I was considering.

One week later I was invited to fly down to Redmond. Microsoft paid for the flights, sightseeing expenses, and a generous amount of food.

The onsite interview itself was four rounds. The first round was a standard dynamic programming problem, maximum-sum subarray. The next two rounds were tailored to my expressed interest in machine learning, and involved implementing the k-means algorithm and a predictive progress bar. The final round was with the team lead, who asked a very trivial coding problem and talked more about the position.

Previous reviews mentioned receiving an offer on the spot, which worried me when I was let go without a word. I got a phone call five days later with an offer.

Interview Details – Got an compus interview, 30mins. Asked about your project. Code question: reverse an string, and how to test your function.

Interview Details – Applied online via website. Got a request for a phone interview about a month later. Phone interview was about 30 minutes and mainly asked like what parts of software you like dealing with (UI, Backend, Application layer etc) and then a test question (how would you test a ____ ) and a small math/logic brainteaser.

Got an email about 3 weeks later saying they would like to skip the next round of phone interviews and fly me out to Seattle for final rounds of interviews. Due to the holidays, the process got delayed a bit, but I set up flight/hotel and my day of interviews.

The whole trip was excellent, I felt like I was really being taken care of. They will reimburse a generous amount of money for things like food, transportation around the city. They even gave me some taxi vouchers on my interview day so I could explore Seattle and I wouldn't even have to pay, and it would get billed to Microsoft directly.

The on-site interview day is a long and challenging day, yet it was still enjoyable. You start out in the recruitment building where all the other candidates will be as well. You'll get individually called out by your recruiter who you meet with first. Then you are taken via Microsoft Connect vehicles to the building in which your team you will be interviewing with works.

I had 4 interviews, all technical. Every interview started out with a bit of resume talk, future plans and things about your time at school. Then we did 1 or 2 programming problems each. The technical problems are pretty industry standard, ranging from string manipulation to data structures, to graph theory. Just be sure to talk your way through them with the interviewer. All the interviewers asked even more probing questions to see how much you know about a subject. They asked me all the way down to actually implementing a hashing function when the topic of HashSets came up. But remember, it's okay to admit you don't know at a certain point!

They seem pretty agnostic about what language you use, and one interviewer even started the interview by saying that he is not a compiler, and will not care if there are small syntax errors. That was reassuring and put my mind to ease for small things.

There is also a lunch interview where you get some a lunch voucher to pay for you and your interviewer's lunch. Very light discussion during lunch, mostly about resume and past projects.

After all this, you will meet with your recruiter back at the recruitment building. My interviews went from 10am-5pm. Like previously stated, they gave me some taxi vouchers and I explored Seattle all night before returning to my hotel and catching my flight back the next morning. I can't wait to start!

Negotiation Details – Did not negotiate, it was above my expectations anyway.

Interview Details – Began with standard HR phone screen including a few brain teasers and technical problems, but mostly focused on my background in computer science, technical ability, etc. The interviewer was very nice and cordial but was somewhat difficult to understand. She said I should hear back within a week about where I stand in the process.

Interview Details – Very responsive process. The process take 2 week. I don't do well on the first round of interview but it was a greate experience

Interview Details – Soon after I cleared the campus round I was called for the on site interview at Redmond. There were four interviews, 1 hour each. All the questions were coding based, you just have to be comfortable with writing code on a white board.

Interview Details – I applied via for the position via school's career fair. After a week, they sent me email to setup an on school campus interview. After two weeks, they sent a congratulation email saying that I passed the 1st round and they decided to moved me to Seattle for on-campus interviews. There were 4 interviews within one days, starting at 9:am and ending at 1:pm. They informed the results with offer the same day.
Q1. Design an algorithm to create a puzzle
Q2. Ordered binary tree
Q3. Palidrome string
Q4. Implement IndexOf() function

Negotiation Details – non-negotiable

Interview Details – Email from an on-campus recruiter gauging interest led to a phone screen interview. From there I was invited to an on-site interview in Seattle. There I had four ~45 min interviews. Each one started with some basic questions about my resume, then moved into 1-2 technical questions.