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 66.4% 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 946 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 946 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 an employee referral. The process took 1 day. I interviewed at Microsoft (Seattle, WA) in Jan 2008
Interview
Rigorous interview lasting 8 hours. I met 7 different people -- so 7 interviews. Mostly technical around data structure, algorithms via problem solving. Some very theoretical questions on formal database and OO concepts.
Questions were: how to do so-and-so in a linked list. Algorithm to come out of a maze given that you cannot turn left, or how to do recursive queries, some C questions, etc.
Interview questions [2]
Question 1
How to come out of a maze given that you can move one step at a time and you cannot turn left.
In employee table there is a self reference to boss (who is also an employee). How to find the number of people that work under a given person for his entire tree.
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.