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Software Development Engineer Interview Experience - Seattle, Washington

January 1, 2015
Positive ExperienceGot Offer

Process

I got the interview through a recruiter who contacted me on LinkedIn.

My first interview was a 1-hour Skype call. The first 20 minutes involved general questions about my CV, followed by 40 minutes for three coding exercises.

After this, I had an on-site interview. This consisted of three separate interviews, each lasting almost an hour, conducted in the interviewers' offices. All of these focused on programming on a whiteboard and were very different from each other.

Questions

At the beginning, the usual ones:

  • Given a string, shuffle it so that no two same letters are together.
  • Sorting with low memory and its space/time complexity.
  • Given a random list of integers, write a function that returns sets taken from the list such that the sum of these numbers is equal (if possible).

A lot of abstract questions about the fundamentals (sorting, etc.) and some very tricky ones about how to design efficient algorithms to enumerate some special type of linked lists.

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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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