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Software Engineer Interview Questions

Software engineers write programs to design and develop computer software. Interviews are highly technical, so come ready to work through coding problems and math brainteasers. The specific questions you are asked will depend on what type of programming position you are looking for. Try researching a specific software discipline such as web development, application development, or system development.

Top Software Engineer Interview Questions & How to Answer

Question 1

Question #1: How would you describe your programming task process?

How to answer
How to answer: When answering a question about your process or life cycle for software development and engineering, it's helpful to consider every step, beginning with obtaining the requirements for the end product. Include as much detail as possible to help the interviewer learn more about any work you've done as a software engineer and how you handle a task to show your ability to tackle a project from start to finish.
Question 2

Question #2: Which programming languages do you know and prefer?

How to answer
How to answer: An interviewer will want to know what programming languages you're familiar with, as well as which languages you prefer. This question doesn't necessarily have a right or wrong answer, but it does provide insights into your capabilities and coding expertise. If the job listing for which you are interviewing includes specific language knowledge preferences, make sure to include them when outlining the software languages you know.
Question 3

Question 3: What is an example of a successful project that you completed?

How to answer
How to answer: When describing your success with a past project, it's helpful to identify aspects of the project that went well and detail the different task list elements. You can describe the team with whom you worked on the project, how you managed your time, and how you specifically contributed to the project.

419,183 software engineer interview questions shared by candidates

Grid Illumination: Given an NxN grid with an array of lamp coordinates. Each lamp provides illumination to every square on their x axis, every square on their y axis, and every square that lies in their diagonal (think of a Queen in chess). Given an array of query coordinates, determine whether that point is illuminated or not. The catch is when checking a query all lamps adjacent to, or on, that query get turned off. The ranges for the variables/arrays were about: 10^3 < N < 10^9, 10^3 < lamps < 10^9, 10^3 < queries < 10^9.
avatar

Software Engineer Intern

Interviewed at Dropbox

3.8★
Sep 29, 2016

Grid Illumination: Given an NxN grid with an array of lamp coordinates. Each lamp provides illumination to every square on their x axis, every square on their y axis, and every square that lies in their diagonal (think of a Queen in chess). Given an array of query coordinates, determine whether that point is illuminated or not. The catch is when checking a query all lamps adjacent to, or on, that query get turned off. The ranges for the variables/arrays were about: 10^3 < N < 10^9, 10^3 < lamps < 10^9, 10^3 < queries < 10^9.

Given a 1TB file of serialized 4 byte integers, and 2GB of ram, sort the integers into a resulting 1TB file. My interviewer was very collaborative in entertaining various solution ideas until we came up with a combo that would work performantly and reduce the number of passes over the 1TB file and intermediate files.
avatar

Senior Software Engineer

Interviewed at Meta

3.5★
Oct 14, 2010

Given a 1TB file of serialized 4 byte integers, and 2GB of ram, sort the integers into a resulting 1TB file. My interviewer was very collaborative in entertaining various solution ideas until we came up with a combo that would work performantly and reduce the number of passes over the 1TB file and intermediate files.

for encoding that {a,b,c,...,z}<->{1,2,3,...,26} if given a list of digit e.g. [1,2,3], this may represent {1,2,3}->{a,b,c} or {12,3}->{l,c} or {1,23}->{a,w}. so there are 3 possible interpretations for list [1,2,3] so, given a list of digit, calculate the number of possible interpretations for the list.
avatar

Software Engineer Intern

Interviewed at Meta

3.5★
Oct 3, 2016

for encoding that {a,b,c,...,z}<->{1,2,3,...,26} if given a list of digit e.g. [1,2,3], this may represent {1,2,3}->{a,b,c} or {12,3}->{l,c} or {1,23}->{a,w}. so there are 3 possible interpretations for list [1,2,3] so, given a list of digit, calculate the number of possible interpretations for the list.

Pancakes, size varies, and are put in a stack with random order. You have one operation called Flip(int[] pancakes, int k) to flip all pancakes from the top one to kth pancake, write a sort(int[] pancakes]) method
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Software Development Engineer

Interviewed at Microsoft

4★
Dec 30, 2011

Pancakes, size varies, and are put in a stack with random order. You have one operation called Flip(int[] pancakes, int k) to flip all pancakes from the top one to kth pancake, write a sort(int[] pancakes]) method

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