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      Software Development Engineer Interview

      24 Nov 2011
      Anonymous interview candidate
      No offer
      Negative experience
      Average interview

      Application

      I applied through university. The process took 5 days. I interviewed at Microsoft in Oct 2011

      Interview

      An initial university interview with a campus recruiter went well and left a positive impression. The interview consisted of some string manipulation questions, substring searching... standard stuff. The recruiter was engaging and had a lot of good answers to my questions. After that, I was invited out to Redmond for interviews, and that is where things were a bit off. I was scheduled for the afternoon interviews, with my latest interview being around 5:00. Being from the eastern side of the US, this was quite late for me and I was very sleepy by the end of it. We were told we would be given lunch before our interviews, but no lunch was given leaving those of us who had not eaten fairly hungry. I also found out I was being interviewed for the wrong position due to a clerical error. All of my interviewers (there were 4) except for one were rushed and had little to no time for questions from me at all. They had been doing interviews all day and did not really seem to care or want to speak with me about anything but their technical questions so that they could move on to the next candidate. Each of the 4 interviews consisted of a few questions about previous projects followed by a technical question that took almost the whole interview time-slot to implement before I was tossed off to another interviewer. Due to jet lag and the late interview times, my later interviews did not go too well and I was quite burned out by the end of it. They had a fun lobby with a MS Surface, Guitar Hero and other entertainment, but the people just seemed cold and uncaring compared to other companies with whom I had interviewed in the past.

      Interview questions [1]

      Question 1

      Copy a singly linked list with the following twist: each node in the linked list has, in addition to a pointer to the next node in the list, a pointer to null or some other node in the linked list.
      1 Answer

      Other Software Development Engineer interview reviews for Microsoft

      Software Development Engineer I Interview

      22 Jul 2025
      Anonymous interview candidate
      No offer
      Positive experience
      Average interview

      Application

      I interviewed at Microsoft

      Interview

      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.
      1 Answer

      Software Development Engineer Interview

      20 Jun 2025
      Anonymous interview candidate
      No offer
      Positive experience
      Average interview

      Application

      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
      Answer question

      Software Development Engineer Interview

      28 Feb 2024
      Anonymous employee
      Shanghai, Shanghai
      Accepted offer
      Positive experience
      Difficult interview

      Application

      I interviewed at Microsoft (Shanghai, Shanghai)

      Interview

      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.
      Answer question
      1

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