Microsoft Software Development Engineer interview questions
based on 1.2K ratings - Updated Jul 22, 2025
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Software Development Engineer applicants have rated the interview process at Microsoft with 4 out of 5 (where 5 is the highest level of difficulty) and assessed their interview experience as 100% positive. To compare, the company-average is 71.3% positive. This is according to Glassdoor user ratings.
Candidates applying for Software Development Engineer roles take an average of 1 day to get hired, when considering 1 user submitted interviews for this role. To compare, the hiring process at Microsoft overall takes an average of 46 days.
Common stages of the interview process at Microsoft as a Software Development Engineer according to 1 Glassdoor interviews include:
Phone interview: 100%
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1 online technical MCQ test. There was a shortlist after this.
2 codes (1 based on string another on linked list)
3 Technical interviews(During the first one, there was only one interviewer who made us sit in a circle and gave a code to write. Then he move from one person to another to ask questions)
1 HR interview
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Return the nodes of binary tree which forms its diameter.
Was flown into Seattle for full round of interviews for internship.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Have you seen the progress bar on windows, that shows estimated time left for transferring your file to external hard disk? Design a class/function to display that time. Given hard disk file transfer rate and a function to measure how much many bytes of the file have actually been transferred.
I applied through college or university. The process took 1 day. I interviewed at Microsoft (Dublin, Dublin) in Nov 2012
Interview
I got an on-site interview in Dublin for SDE and SDET internship position. I was invited to this interview after a short interview at my university.
I had 3 interviews with 1 SDE team (2 guys) ,1 SDET team (another 2 guys) and 1 Project manager.
I got a lot of questions related to:
Why do I want to work for Microsoft?
Why am I pursuing Computer Science?
What am I looking for in technology?
They asked me about a recent article I read on Techcrunch.
Coding questions were easy:
- count the binary 1 digits in a number
- given two nodes in a binary tree return their Lowest Common Ancestor
- given two strings say if they are anagrams
I also had Testing questions before every coding question on how would I test a method that does the code.
Interview questions [2]
Question 1
At the third interview I was asked which one of the previous interviews I liked better and why?
You have a project and you want to release it in multiple languages. For every language you have a resource file which contains hotkeys of every Module.
For example: one module is File which has Find with hotkey F and Free with hotkey F and another module Edit which has Replace with hotkey R. For every module you want to find the colliding Hotkeys. In our example in module File: Find and Free have colliding hotkey "F".
In the resource file a hotkey is coded as:
\alpha"F"Find.Files;
where \alpha is one character: alpha.
You have 100 languages and around 6000 hotkeys in a resource file. Determine all the colliding hotkeys.