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Software Development Engineer Interview Experience - Seattle, Washington

January 1, 2012
Neutral ExperienceNo Offer

Process

Met with the college recruiter at a career fair. Then, I had a 1:1 interview on campus.

After a few weeks, an on-site interview was offered. It was then rescheduled for the following month.

The on-site consisted of five 1:1 interviews:

  • First, you meet with your recruiter to chat about your hobbies or your plans for your career.
  • Then, they direct you to the first interviewer.
  • Each interviewer escorts you to the next one.
  • The third interviewer is most of the time the lunch interviewer. During lunch, they may ask about your projects or some technology-related questions.
  • Afterward, I had two more interviews. The fourth was with a lead dev, and the last was with a manager.

Don't think that you'll get the job if you make it to the manager. At least, that's not what happened in my case. I got nearly all the questions right during the day and asked a lot of questions about the company, technologies they were using, and about the products.

However, in the end, since a lot of people were applying, they had the chance to be very picky.

Overall, everything was really smooth and professional. I'll probably apply again in the future. Good luck to all of you.

Questions

How to shuffle a deck of cards? (Collage interview)

Design a Queue structure using a linked list and code it. (On-site 1st interview)

Reverse a string in place. Then, reverse the order of words in a sentence? (2nd)

In-order traversal of a binary tree? What if there's a limit on the depth of recursive calls? How can you let the user know that the tree is too deep and the traversal failed? (3rd)

Given a string "1800RENTCAR" that can have spaces anywhere, output "1 800 7368-227". You cannot use any additional memory for mapping characters to integers. You need a math formula to convert them. The output must be exactly the same as the example. (4th)

Given an HTML file <foo> encode it as <foo>. Improve complexity from O(n) to O(log n) to constant time. (5th interview)

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Interview Statistics

The following metrics were computed from 83 interview experiences for the Microsoft Software Development Engineer role in Seattle, Washington.

Success Rate

23%
Pass Rate

Microsoft's interview process for their Software Development Engineer roles in Seattle, Washington is very selective, failing most engineers who go through it.

Experience Rating

Positive54%
Neutral31%
Negative14%

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

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