Microsoft Software Development Engineer II Interview Questions

Interview process itself was good but 20 days after my interview I still had not heard from the recruiter. When I reached out she said they were extending an offer. I received the offer via email with no call from her. When i told her I had questions she said she was busy and asked if we could just discuss via email. Overall a terrible experience with recruiting to received and accept an offer. I am excited to join Microsoft but they don't seem to care about candidate experience.

This interview was for AI cognitive science org at Microsoft in Sunnyvale. One recruiter reached out to me and the recruiter recommended AI cognitive science org for me based on my background. I cleared the online assessment and I was told that I will be moving to onsite interviews next. But that did not happen. First recruiter (recruiter 1) handed off the process to another recruiter (recruiter 2) who told me that hiring manager wants to do a phone screen first. The hiring manager kept procrastinating for 2-3 weeks and finally agreed to interview me. The phone screen interview with hiring manager went well and they immediately told me that they want to move to onsite rounds. They cancelled my onsite rounds 2 days before for some random reason which they did not disclose and told me that they want me to come to Bellevue and interview for there. I agreed and went to Bellevue for the onsite interviews. On the day of onsite interviews, I met my 2nd interviewer initially and my 2nd interviewer (who was gonna conduct the lunch interivew) told me that they had not booked conference rooms for 2 interviews. This was weird. I did my first interview in some temporary conference room. It went well. I had a break in between my 1st round and 2nd round. In this break, they told me that I am supposed to sit in that conference and not roam around. I sat in that conference room for 5-10 minutes and suddenly 10 people showed up with for scrum meeting. Apparently the team which I was interviewing for did not book the conference rooms at all. They kicked me out of the conference room. I had to spend my break time in the kitchen area. After my break, I told the 2nd interviewer about what happened. The 2nd interviewer was smiling and I felt that he knew about this but he was trying his best to hide it. The 2nd interview was supposed to be the lunch interview but he completely forgot about "lunch" part and took me to his workstation and started asking me whiteboard coding questions. I solved the question and gave him optimal solution. When 20 minutes were left, he suddenly remembered the "lunch" part and basically told me to finish my lunch in about 20 minutes. My last interview was a system design interview with hiring manager. The hiring manager works from Sunnyvale but they called me for onsite interviews in Bellevue. They do not have any team members in Bellevue then why invite me there. This was extremely strange. Moreover, the hiring manager joined the interview session via audio call and did not even show me his face. I solved the design question and the hiring manager said that I did a great job overall. I received an automated reject 1 day after. Funniest part of this process was recruiter 2 was hiding under the name of "conference" and basically did not even care to join the prep call. So, I never got a chance to talk to recruiter 2 in the entire process. Even the amount the expenses that they have reimbursed (which is less than the approved amount) does not match the amount that they have approved. Clearly they set me up with some fake interviewing process when they were not even interested. Such a waste of time! Rude people! On the other hand, I am glad because I do not want to be a part of such a team/org where they do not respect people.

Got call from HR for Hyderabad location regarding interview and interview got scheduled next week. It was for Azure Team. I had 4 rounds : 1 DS & Algo, 2 Design, 1 Technical Manager round

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.