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Software Development Engineer Interview Experience - Redmond, Washington

April 1, 2012
Positive ExperienceNo Offer

Process

A total of five rounds.

One on-campus round:

  • Asked about my projects.
  • Described a project done on color-based object tracking.
  • Then asked me to write a function that takes a number as input and outputs it in Roman numeral form.

On-site – Had four rounds:

  • First Round: Implement a class that lets you define user-defined data types. The class should let the user input the number of bits and construct a data type having that many bits.
  • Second Round: Given a Tic-Tac-Toe board, determine if it had a winner.
  • Third Round: Design the Minesweeper game.
  • Fourth Round: A general discussion on how to decide aspect ratio and how to determine a scroll bar's size relative to text. This covered ratios for different monitor sizes.
    • A question on how to determine if two nodes in a binary tree are adjacent.
    • Given an expression in JavaScript, write code to determine if it is a regular expression. (No need to know what a regular expression is beforehand; it was explained, and I was asked to code it.)

Each round was about 1 to 1.5 hours long.

Questions

The Minesweeper design question.

I had to practice object-oriented design, be quick-thinking, interact with the interviewer to extract useful information, and ask the right kinds of questions.

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Interview Statistics

The following metrics were computed from 214 interview experiences for the Microsoft Software Development Engineer role in Redmond, Washington.

Success Rate

45%
Pass Rate

Microsoft's interview process for their Software Development Engineer roles in Redmond, Washington is fairly selective, failing a large portion of engineers who go through it.

Experience Rating

Positive75%
Neutral17%
Negative8%

Candidates reported having very good feelings for Microsoft's Software Development Engineer interview process in Redmond, Washington.

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