You Never Know
You Never Know
You can work with smart people on challenging problems. If you're capable and happen to be on the right team with the right manager, your contributions can be recognized and well rewarded.
Your experience at Microsoft varies by group. Some groups are very political and dysfunctional.
Process can be excessive and slows everything down. Poor planning leads to many "crunch" times, but the extra hours you put in are rarely noticed by the management team that failed to plan in the first place.
Give up control. Just let Microsoft happen.
There are still lots of talented and innovative people at Microsoft. Microsoft also has some awesome technology that attracts developers: the CLR and C#, ASP.NET now that we have MVC, Silverlight, Azure, MESH, and a bunch of other stuff. But you’re quickly losing both.
Empower your employees and embrace open source in the most diverse and extreme ways you can imagine, and then get out of the way. Amazing things would happen.
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Microsoft Interview Questions
Microsoft Interview Experiences
Lead Software Engineer
There was an initial phone interview, followed by an in-person day on campus. I was flown to Redmond and put up in a reasonable hotel by Microsoft. The process consisted of a tough day with about six individual Q&A sessions and usually some kind of p
Lead Software Engineer
A recruiter contacted me and arranged the hotel, rental car, and flight. I met with an HR representative in the morning, then had interviews with managers and engineers. I was questioned on programming skills, algorithm design, programming language k
Software Engineer Intern
Very straightforward, two back-to-back thirty-minute technical interviews that had a combination of LeetCode easy and medium questions, along with some behavioral questions that were sprinkled in there.
Lead Software Engineer
Redmond, Washington, United StatesAugust 1, 2013There was an initial phone interview, followed by an in-person day on campus. I was flown to Redmond and put up in a reasonable hotel by Microsoft. The process consisted of a tough day with about six individual Q&A sessions and usually some kind of p
Lead Software Engineer
Redmond, Washington, United StatesAugust 1, 2008A recruiter contacted me and arranged the hotel, rental car, and flight. I met with an HR representative in the morning, then had interviews with managers and engineers. I was questioned on programming skills, algorithm design, programming language k
Software Engineer Intern
Redmond, Washington, United StatesNovember 21, 2025Very straightforward, two back-to-back thirty-minute technical interviews that had a combination of LeetCode easy and medium questions, along with some behavioral questions that were sprinkled in there.
