Microsoft Software Development Engineer Interview Questions & Reviews
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Updated Feb 14, 2012 – Interview questions and reviews posted anonymously by interview candidates.
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Difficulty Rating [?] Based on 194 ratings 
“Average” Interview
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Interview Experience [?] Based on 194 ratings
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| 11–20 of 193 Microsoft Interviews | Sort by |
Software Development Engineer at Microsoft
Posted Jan 21, 2012
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3.0
Average Interview
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Overall Neutral Experience
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Interviewed and No Offer
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Interviewed Dec 2011 in Redmond, WA (took a day)
I dropped my resume at the Microsoft booth at a career fair. I got an email that had me indicate what timeslots they listed were possible for me, for a phone interview. I also filled out a form to show what position, what development layer, etc I was interested in working in most. I provided my number and my skype name, and said that skype was the most convenient for me. On time, a woman called me on skype (no video) and the interview went right along. She seemed very good at interviewing. It felt very comfortable talking to her, and she made you feel justified in your thinking, and prompted you if you ran out of ideas. The "fun questions" as she called it seemed like brainstorming ideas, anything and everything you think of, you should mention. Get the corner cases, remember safety checks. I got an email 30 minutes after the phone interview ended saying I didn't make the cut. It said I was close, and offered to consider me for a support position, or interview for the developer position again in 2 months. In total, I communicated with 3 different women--the one that scheduled the interview, the interviewer, and the one that followed up on the interview. I asked for feedback/advice from the last woman in my thank-you reply, but she was somewhat dismissive. Otherwise, the vibe I got was okay. Everyone was courteous.
Interview Questions
Other Details
I got the interview through a Recruiter and the interview consisted of a Phone Interview.
Helpful Interview?
Yes |
No
Inappropriate?
Software Development Engineer at Microsoft
Posted Jan 16, 2012
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3.0
Average Interview
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Overall Neutral Experience
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Interviewed and No Offer
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Interviewed Nov 2011 (took a day)
The interview was an on campus interview for undergraduates and recent graduates. The setup of the interview was well organized and communication was clear. This interview was an initial screening, which would have been followed by a full round of interviews in Washington if it went well.
Interview Questions
Other Details
The interview consisted of a 1:1 Interview and a Skills Test.
Helpful Interview?
Yes |
No
Inappropriate?
Software Development Engineer at Microsoft
Posted Jan 15, 2012
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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 Oct 2011 (took 2 weeks)
Resume sent through career fair in school. I was sent information to sign up for a phone interview slot. The phone interview lasted for about one hour asking me for some background information and my past coding experience (what is the longest program you've written). As I was also interviewing for the google APM position, they asked my organizational skills as well.
Interview Questions
Other Details
The interview consisted of a Phone Interview.
Helpful Interview?
Yes |
No
Inappropriate?
Software Development Engineer at Microsoft
Posted Jan 14, 2012
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3.0
Average Interview
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Overall Neutral Experience
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Interviewed and No Offer
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Interviewed Jan 2012 in Seattle, WA (took 2 months)
Met with the collage recruiter in career fair. Then had a 1.1 interview on the campus. After a few weeks on-site is offered. Then it is rescheduled for the next month. On site consisted of 5 1.1 interviews. First you meet with your recruiter chat about your hobbies or your plans for your career. Then, she directs you to the first interviewer. Each interviewer escorts you to the next one. The third one is most of the time lunch interviewer. During the lunch he may ask about your projects or some technology related questions. Then, I had two more interviews. The forth one was with a lead dev and the last one was with a manager. Don't think that you will get the job if you made to the manager. At least that's not happened in my case. I got the nearly all the questions right during the day. Asked a lot of questions about company, technologies they are using or about the products. However, in the end since a lot of people are applying they have the chance to very picky. Overall, everything was really smooth and professional. Probably I'll apply again in the future. Good luck to all of you.
Interview Questions
Given HTML file <foo> encode it as <foo>. Improve complexity from O(n) to O(logn) to constant time (5th interview)
Other Details
I got the interview through a College or University and the interview consisted of a Phone Interview and a 1:1 Interview.
Helpful Interview?
Yes |
No
Inappropriate?
Software Development Engineer at Microsoft
Posted Jan 13, 2012 — 0 of 1 people found this helpful
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3.0
Average Interview
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Overall Neutral Experience
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Interviewed and No Offer
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Interviewed Nov 2011 in Seattle, WA (took 4+ weeks)
I had 1 phone interview which followed up by 5 interviews onsite. They were not very difficult, I was asked usual questions which include knowledge about data structures, sorting, recursion and some concurrency control. You are usually interviewed usually the same day with a bunch of other candidates (who are interviewed by the same team) which for me increased the stress.
Interview Questions
Other Details
I Applied Online and the interview consisted of a Phone Interview and a 1:1 Interview.
Helpful Interview?
Yes |
No
Inappropriate?
Software Development Engineer at Microsoft
Posted Jan 7, 2012
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3.0
Average Interview
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Overall Neutral Experience
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Received and Accepted Offer
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Interviewed Dec 2011 in Hyderabad (India) (took 3 days)
One written and three round of interviews. The last one was HR.
Interview Questions
Negotiation Details
The pay was fixed. No negotiation.
Other Details
I got the interview through a College or University and the interview consisted of a 1:1 Interview, an IQ/Intelligence Test, a Skills Test and a Personality Test.
Helpful Interview?
Yes |
No
Inappropriate?
Software Development Engineer at Microsoft
Posted Jan 6, 2012
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3.0
Average Interview
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Overall Neutral Experience
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Interviewed and No Offer
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Interviewed Oct 2011 (took 3 weeks)
first round interview for software development engineer position. the scheduling process was fairly straightforward. i answered a questionnaire they sent me.
interview was in the university's career services center.
met one on one with a project manager for a half hour. talked for a little while about my background and the job opportunity. then he asked me to write a boolean method to find out if something is a power of 2.
after the interview i didnt hear back for about 2 weeks, at which point i got an email.
Overall it was relatively streamlined, there were some hiccups along the way, but seeing as it didnt go very far it didnt matter so much.
Interview Questions
Other Details
I got the interview through a College or University and the interview consisted of a 1:1 Interview.
Helpful Interview?
Yes |
No
Inappropriate?
Software Development Engineer at Microsoft
Posted Dec 30, 2011
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3.0
Average Interview
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Overall Neutral Experience
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Interviewed and No Offer
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Interviewed Nov 2011 in Seattle, WA (took a day)
A telephone interview, asking non-technical questions and offered an on-site interview. Four rounds, thought doing well, but failed. All technical questions. One impression is Microsoft Office people like loops and very much hate recursions.
Interview Questions
Other Details
I got the interview through a College or University and the interview consisted of a Phone Interview.
Helpful Interview?
Yes |
No
Inappropriate?
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.
Helpful Interview?
Yes |
No
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Software Development Engineer at Microsoft
Posted Dec 12, 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 (took a day)
Just had the phone interview so no idea on the outcome yet.
The interviewer was very friendly and knowledgeable and offered plenty of opportunities to ask questions about the company, the position and so on. We then talked about my resume and what projects I'd worked on. He asked me about my most technically challenging project and the various issues I encountered as well as how I solved them in detail.
He then asked a brain teaser / algorithm type question which took a little coaching for me to get right. I'd revised quite hard on data structures and algorithms but found myself rather unprepared for the question.
I didn't get the perfect answer but made sure to keep talking and offering up suggestions. This led to me being asked other questions which I could answer easily. Overall, it was a friendly interview but I'm 50/50 on if I'll get a call back.
Interview Questions
Other Details
I got the interview through a Recruiter and the interview consisted of a Phone Interview.
Helpful Interview?
Yes |
No
Inappropriate?
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