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Got the offer

SDE Intern at Microsoft

Difficulty
Process took
1-2 Weeks
Rounds
3
Format
Other
Applied via
Other

How it went

Most candidates fail not because of logic, but because they go silent while thinking. Microsoft interviewers genuinely prefer:

  • Clean reasoning
  • Small hints asked politely
  • Step-by-step approach Practice solving while speaking, even if you're alone.

What they would tell you

Most candidates fail not because of logic, but because they go silent while thinking. Microsoft interviewers genuinely prefer:

  • Clean reasoning
  • Small hints asked politely
  • Step-by-step approach Practice solving while speaking, even if you're alone.

How to prepare

If you are solid on these patterns, you are already 80% prepared:

  • Sliding window
  • Two pointers
  • Matrix traversal
  • Hashing/frequency
  • Recursion + DFS/BFS
  • Basic DP Instead of solving 500 questions, solve 100 good-quality ones with full understanding

Their background

Hey everyone I recently wrapped up the Microsoft SDE Intern hiring process, and I’m super grateful to share that I got selected.

Round by round

  1. 1

    Online Assessment60 min

    The first step was the internal shortlist my college shared with Microsoft. They filtered candidates mainly based on resume quality + academic performance, and I was fortunate enough to make it to the next phase Then, OA had two coding problems, both very doable if you have practiced standard patterns.

    • Easy
    • Medium Both questions were clean, not trick-heavy, but they expected optimal time complexity.
  2. 2

    Technical Interview 160 min

    This was a mix of resume, fundamentals, and one solid coding problem What the round looked like:

    • A short introduction
    • Conceptual questions from OS, OOP, DBMS, and basic DSA
    • The projects on my resume
    • Then a Sliding Window DSA question (medium difficulty)
  3. 3

    Technical Interview 260 min

    It started with:

    • My introduction

    • Motivations, interests, and basic HR-style questions Then moved into the tech part:

    • A two-pointer based string question, where I had to validate transformations under certain constraints.

    • A few test-case discussions

    • Checking if I proactively cover boundary values

    • A couple of OS-related questions sprinkled towards the end The interviewer focused heavily on how I reason, not just the code.

What came up

Easy MediumOther0 1 years

A candidate-reported account, lightly edited. Interview processes change by team and date.

Sources