Microsoft·Software Engineer

Microsoft Software Engineer interview experience

No offer

Medium

Negative

Candidate report, summarized by Dataford

My Microsoft SDE2 screening round felt tense from the start.

I was asked to determine whether a tree is a BST, and I immediately started with an inorder traversal approach. As I talked through optimization ideas, the interviewer pushed hard on the idea of achieving O(1) memory complexity.

I was already frustrated by around the 40-minute mark, because I couldn’t get the solution approach to match the interviewer’s specific constraint quickly enough. Later, after the call ended, I realized it could be solved using Morris inorder traversal, which would have satisfied that O(1) memory requirement.

I didn’t move forward, and what stuck with me was how

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Microsoft Software Engineer interview experience | Dataford