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      Software Development Engineer II Interview

      Dec 2, 2019
      Anonymous Interview Candidate
      Redmond, WA
      No offer
      Negative experience
      Difficult interview

      Application

      I applied through other source. The process took 1 day. I interviewed at Microsoft (Redmond, WA) in Nov 2019

      Interview

      Interviewed for an SDE II position with the Microsoft Academic Graph team. I will say outright an absolutely terrible interview experience for me. The team asked me some specific questions about how I would add features in Microsoft Academic Graph. After this, during the second hour, they asked me an architecture question which I did very well on. Then they asked me to write the code for a specific data structure, going conceptually through the characteristics of this particular data structure with me, after a while telling me to write it in pseudo-code. I felt like I did pretty well up until this point, though I had felt that I didn’t implement the data structure completely.  (They later told me that I didn’t pass the interview because I didn’t write complete code in C++ for this data structure). What bothered me about this interview process however was that during the lunch interview my interviewer asked me a lot of very personal questions that were completely unrelated to the job. I told her about how I used to take care of children, and she told me that I should go back to doing that instead of being a Software Engineer. Furthermore, during the lunch interview the interviewer only consumed a single banana, and threw the rest of her food away. I strongly felt that, due to the nature of the questions that she was asking, and her generally condescending attitude toward me this was some sort of racist dig toward me (I am an underrepresented minority). Going through this experience and watching her eat the banana while making chiding jokes about how I shouldn’t be a Software Engineer was completely humiliating, unprofessional and made this interview ultimately a waste of my time. Because of this, I keep a strongly negative impression of Microsoft as a company. There was another interview after this, but it was with the same person, and I felt completely uncomfortable about the entire thing. After this I was a pencil as a “parting gift”. If this was some kind of a joke I am definitely not amused. Out of CS graduates with Computer Science degrees, Microsoft tends to not hire women and underrepresented minorities, including women of color such as myself. Microsoft should do better, including hiring interviewers that are sensitive to their own bias and blind spots, and who definitely don’t openly make fun of people. Furthermore, If they wanted me to implement the code, which was far more than 8 lines (the GeeksforGeeks.com implementation of this data structure in C++ is no less than 50 lines of code for instance) then it would be good to specifically tell the candidate to implement that data structure in actual code, in order to guide them in the right direction as opposed to the wrong one, even if the requirements somehow can’t be made clear for specific reasons during the interview itself.

      Interview questions [1]

      Question 1

      Q. Implement a KD tree in C++.
      1 Answer
      2

      Other Software Development Engineer II Interview Reviews for Microsoft

      Software Development Engineer II Interview

      Oct 21, 2025
      Anonymous Interview Candidate
      Redmond, WA
      No offer
      Positive experience
      Difficult interview

      Application

      I interviewed at Microsoft (Redmond, WA)

      Interview

      1 Technical Screen, Leetcode Hard question about Graphs. Interview loop over two days, 4 rounds. 3 rounds had Leetcode Medium/Hard along with System Design questions and behavioral. Manger round was mostly behavioral along with a design question. DSA went well but the design questions were not upto the mark.

      Interview questions [1]

      Question 1

      Design a distributed file sharing service
      Answer question

      Software Development Engineer II Interview

      Jul 25, 2024
      Anonymous Interview Candidate
      Australind
      No offer
      Positive experience
      Average interview

      Application

      I applied online. The process took 2 months. I interviewed at Microsoft (Australind) in Apr 2024

      Interview

      online coding,regrex expression,computer network。some system design。focus on bug free and comnunication skill. very tough question,corner case should be considered. good interviewer they are kind and give me a lot of hint

      Interview questions [1]

      Question 1

      online coding test and system design
      Answer question

      Software Development Engineer II Interview

      Feb 18, 2022
      Anonymous Interview Candidate
      Redmond, WA
      No offer
      Negative experience
      Average interview

      Application

      I applied through a recruiter. The process took 2 months. I interviewed at Microsoft (Redmond, WA)

      Interview

      The process was very simple. Recruiter contacted me on LinkedIn. Finished the online coding assessment. From there a Microsoft Hiring Event day was scheduled. Interview was pretty simple, Straight up leetcode. didn't even change the examples. 1st interview was medium leetcode. When I solved it in 15 mins, 2nd question was asked, After that a behavioral. This interview was finished in under 40 minutes 2nd interviewer asked a very common leetcode question. He asked me if I saw that question on leetcode. when I solved that he asked me to optimize it which I did. And then a behavioral. 3rd interview was OOD after a behavioral question. The interviewer did not ask any follow up questions. This interview was finished in under 40 minutes. 4th interview was a Tree based question which was also solved in the most optimal way. Interviewer mentioned that he has very less experience in java and couldn't understand some of the code. No follow up questions. there was another behavioral question. This interview was also done in 40 minutes. When i checked with recruiter I was told that I was rejected. I was very confident about this interview. I still don't understand why I was rejected.

      Interview questions [1]

      Question 1

      Basic leetcode questions. All of them were from Explore section of Microsoft.
      Answer question
      1

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