Software Engineer II Interview Experience - Redmond, Washington
Process
I received a call from the recruiter, who then set up a phone screen with a member of the hiring team. This process took about a week.
After clearing the technical screen, I was invited onsite for a round of interviews. The entire process took about two weeks.
Round 1: Dynamic programming. The interviewer did not acknowledge the concept of using an array of 256 characters and instead insisted I use a hashmap. This question, if solved genuinely, takes a few hours and cannot be finished and tested in 40 minutes unless one is copying it from LeetCode.
Round 2: Design the game of Boggle and return a list of all words that are of length three or more. I provided a recursive solution by the end, but the interviewer was looking for a better solution (recursive but with fewer lines of code). This is a question that cannot be coded and tested in 40 minutes.
Round 3: "What is a binary search tree? Why do we use them?" Write code to check if a given binary tree is a binary search tree. I gave the solution using in-order traversal, but the interviewer felt the code was hard to read and not maintainable, opting instead for a single line of code using C#'s Enumerable class. He then discussed an NP-complete problem for 30 minutes, without a clear idea of what he was asking. "We use constraints" and "these are open discussion problems" were the two phrases iterated throughout.
A negative experience.
Questions
Cannot disclose as I signed an NDA.
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Interview Statistics
The following metrics were computed from 26 interview experiences for the Microsoft Software Engineer II role in Redmond, Washington.
Success Rate
Microsoft's interview process for their Software Engineer II roles in Redmond, Washington is fairly selective, failing a large portion of engineers who go through it.
Experience Rating
Candidates reported having very good feelings for Microsoft's Software Engineer II interview process in Redmond, Washington.
Microsoft Work Experiences
- 3.0Work very hard, but do not expect to be rewarded for itSoftware Engineer II • Current EmployeeRedmond, Washington, United StatesJune 11, 2016Pros: I have been working for Microsoft for a couple of years now in different teams. A lot of people say the teams in Microsoft can be drastically different, with some teams having a harsh environment while others a much more friendly one. Well, my experience working on different teams was pretty similar, and I can say the same for some of my teammates that worked on different teams as well. Some of the pros are: * Fair base salary * Large company with lots of opportunities * Some smart engineers * Good benefits (vacation, parental leave, health care, etc).Cons: When it comes to the working environment, Microsoft has evolved a lot in the last couple of years. The evolution was triggered mostly by getting rid of the draconian stack ranking review system, where even great engineers could get poor reviews. However, there's still much to improve before I could say Microsoft has a friendly and truly cooperative environment and a meritocracy-based rewards system. There's still a lot of politics, where the people who "rub the managers' backs" the most are the first being rewarded. Most engineers there are not really interested in helping each other. Rewards are not based on results and talent, but on politics and the number of years they have been working there. When it comes to work-life balance, some managers push people to work very hard, but when they do so and achieve great results, there's little to no recognition for that. In some managers' minds, working 12-14 hours a day is just expected. Other managers might not push you too hard, but don't expect any recognition from them as well. To be fair, it's fairly quick to get promotions from lower levels, but from mid to higher levels (62 and up), it becomes very difficult. Just results and talent is not enough; politics is required. When it comes to compensation, the base salary is fair and aligned with the industry. However, stocks and bonuses are well below similarly recognized companies, so compensation altogether is 50-150k below companies like Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, and even Amazon.
- 3.0Don't work for Microsoft if you canSoftware Engineer II • Current EmployeeRedmond, Washington, United StatesSeptember 14, 2017Pros: Bad compensation for most employees.Cons: Not just bad, but much worse compensation.
- 3.0Software Engineer IISoftware Engineer II • Current EmployeeRedmond, Washington, United StatesMarch 19, 2016Pros: It is a good place to work.Cons: No work-life balance at all.
Microsoft Interview Questions
