Prepare for Microsoft with a focused mix of coding, design, and communication. Start with your job description and confirm the interview loop with your recruiter.
01 / MAKE YOUR NEXT SESSION COUNT
Merge two sorted arrays. Then adapt your solution when one array has enough unused space to hold both. Explain how you avoid overwriting unread values.
A maintained invariant, correct boundary handling, and justified complexity.
Find the longest substring without repeating characters. Walk through a repeated character, an empty input, and a string with all unique characters.
Correct window updates, explicit character assumptions, and linear-time reasoning.
Describe a technical decision you changed after receiving feedback. Explain your contribution and the outcome.
Specific actions, honest reflection, and measurable impact.
BEFORE YOU PRACTICE
Get the details that a generic company guide cannot know.
Company-linked challenges and related lessons from our library. Not a prediction of your interview.
Aggregated from candidate submissions and public sources.
Historical figures from existing records; date and location may be unspecified. Verify current ranges on Levels.fyi.
SDE · 59
$157,416
$106,235 base · $29,277 stock · $21,904 bonus
60
$160,330
$115,286 base · $28,462 stock · $16,582 bonus
SDE II · 61
$171,991
$130,848 base · $24,580 stock · $16,563 bonus
62
$183,144
$138,285 base · $27,134 stock · $17,725 bonus
Senior SDE · 63
$213,361
$153,349 base · $36,919 stock · $23,093 bonus
11 reports from candidates who interviewed at Microsoft.
Reviews originally posted on Glassdoor.
Great benefits with health insurance, legal support, and gym membership. It is a true software company if software engineering is indeed your passion. Base pay and RSUs are lower than industry. Because of that the good people leave for better pay eventually. This causes not only churn, but also reduces the quality of the engineers eventually. Satya did a good job on the image of the company, however when you are inside, many things are the same. Diversity and inclusion is a joke. Most upper mid-level management (some M2s, most directors, DEs, junior VPs) resist to change, so organizations, ICs, M1s get stuck in between.
I work on a great team where my manager actively puts me on work that will allow me to move forward in my career while considering what I am most interested in learning. I have great work/life balance, working 8-4pm most days. As long as your work gets done on time they don't mind which hours you are in the office. Of course this probably changes depending on the team or how high up the ladder you are. It can feel harder to do big exciting new things on a very old code base that we desperately want running smoothly.
Surrounded by brilliant people, work on projects with major impact, work with people from around the world. Corporate structure, sometimes slow to move or change direction, promotion is not necessarily about merit, job is often all-consuming. Be more generous with health benefits. Increase pay. Allow teams to take more chances. Practice what you preach about "work/life balance".
Great change in culture since Satya took over. Supportive environment, lots of new opportunities. Everything is building crazy fast and many tools for building and operating services at scale are behind what Amazon, Google, Facebook have, other tools framework fall to disinvestment/pullback, lots of knowledge sharing still suffers from sharepoint not searchable/restricted access syndrome. Invest heavily in engineering excellence and institutional knowledge and openness.
I have found Microsoft to be a company with an ambitious, competitive, and diverse workforce. Blind spots exist and are like that of other industry leaders. The effort to eliminate them seems sincere if sometimes a little misguided, but its forgivable since management from the top down appears to buy in. Campus construction has made a mess of everything. Program managers want data for everything. Ordinarily that would be good. Sometimes they should embrace their roles as thought and design leaders rather than blindly following where the data takes them. Bring back windows mobile and never quit it again.
