Software Development Engineer applicants have rated the interview process at Microsoft with 3.1 out of 5 (where 5 is the highest level of difficulty) and assessed their interview experience as 62% positive. To compare, the company-average is 66.3% positive. This is according to Glassdoor user ratings.
Candidates applying for Software Development Engineer roles take an average of 23 days to get hired, when considering 947 user submitted interviews for this role. To compare, the hiring process at Microsoft overall takes an average of 30 days.
Common stages of the interview process at Microsoft as a Software Development Engineer according to 947 Glassdoor interviews include:
One on one interview: 40%
Phone interview: 21%
Skills test: 19%
Background check: 6%
Personality test: 4%
IQ intelligence test: 3%
Presentation: 3%
Group panel interview: 3%
Drug test: 1%
Other: 0%
Here are the most commonly searched roles for interview reports -
I applied through college or university. The process took 1 day. I interviewed at Microsoft
Interview
Referral/School career fair, then phone screen, then an onsite. You're either applying for a software engineering role or a program manager (PM, pretty much product managing) role, though often times they don't really take your preferences into account. The onsite consists of 3 - 5 interviews (it oddly varied depending on the person, not sure why that is).
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
A recruiter read off a list of questions from a sheet of paper and recorded them down.
Questions were things like:
- Tell me a time when you worked on a team, what role did you play
- Tell me a time when you faced a technical difficulty
- How many lines of code was your biggest project
- Tell me about a project you've worked on
- Do you like problem solving?
It started with a 90-minute online assessment, followed by a technical phone screen with one engineer. The OA covered two medium-to-hard algorithm problems. For coding practice, I mainly rely on "LeetCode" to cover different topics. For company-specific interview preparation, I use "Hack2Hire", "LeetCode Discuss", and "1Point3Acres" to find any recent original questions. All of them are helpful platforms. The phone screen included one coding problem and some discussion around edge cases and time complexity.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Given a list of meeting time intervals, determine if a person could attend all meetings.
I applied online. The process took 1 week. I interviewed at Microsoft in Dec 2024
Interview
I was invited to a technical interview with Microsoft. The interviewer started with a general question: “What happens when you type google.com into your browser?” They asked a few follow-up questions related to that.
After that, they gave me a LeetCode algorithmic question, which was at a hard level. The problem was “Integer to English Words.”
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
1. What happens when you type google.com into your browser?
2. “Integer to English Words” – LeetCode algorithmic question
Three tech interviews + one hiring manager VO, most of questions are medium to hard leetcode questions. Ask some questions about techniques you written on the resume. But I think they care more about the match of the research and the job.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Tell me about the recommendation System you made for the work.