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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The process took 4 weeks. I interviewed at Microsoft in Oct 2010
Interview
I submitted my resume to a recruiter in a college career fair. 3 days later I received an email about on-campus interview. The on-campus interview took place after 2 weeks and consisted of a 1:1 interview with a technical manager from Windows Media Player Testing team. He was nice and everything. First half of the interview consisted of general questions about my projects and what I was working on. The second part was technical and he asked me a really simple question: Calculate factorial recursively. I coded on a piece of paper and spoke out loud the steps. And also wrote the special case checks and stuff. Then he asked the test cases and I gave the test cases(-ve numbers, characters,etc). Then he asked the complexity of the algorithm, where I stumbled a bit. But he helped me in that and we came up with the answer O(n). After that, I didn't hear from Microsoft in 3-4 weeks. I sent an email to the recruiter after 2 weeks without reply. On the 4th week, I was anxious, as I had an onsite interview with another company and emailed again. I got a reply that I was rejected :(
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Complexity of a program to calculate factorial recursively
I applied through college or university. The process took 1 day. I interviewed at Microsoft in Sep 2010
Interview
First of all get a question about sorting a singly linked list, add an ordered node to the list.
Then, another PM question, if I were the Manager of all Windows 8 product, and the team of testing ask you to install the system on every PC of the company, what would you do?
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
If you have an array of strings with numbers on it, return the integer value.
I applied through a recruiter. The process took 1 day. I interviewed at Microsoft (Mountain View, CA) in Feb 2010
Interview
The interview was for a software developer postion for Mac software department in MS. They're hiring for C++ developers to work on Outlook on Mac since Entourage would be discontinued. The interviewer was very kind and mentioned that he would start with basic OO questions such as polymorphism, virtual function, etc.
- asked me to provide an example of polymorphism
- How to handle exceptions without using try and catch?
- Hashing
- asked me to explain wow virtual function works at low level
- Linked List vs. Array
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
explain virtual function call mechanism at memory level