The short answer
A Microsoft-style mock interview is a practice round shaped like the interviews Microsoft describes on its careers site: problem solving and coding, design for more experienced roles, and questions about collaboration and how you learn. On Revvox each round is 60 minutes live with an experienced engineer, scored 1 to 5 on five skills, with a written report within 24 hours. We are not affiliated with Microsoft and do not claim our interviewers work there.
What a Microsoft-style loop usually includes
Microsoft's careers site offers interview tips that stress problem solving out loud, asking clarifying questions and talking about how you work with others. For software engineers, the process typically includes a recruiter conversation, sometimes an online coding assessment, and then a set of interviews, often held on one day.
Most rounds are coding and data structures. More experienced candidates usually also get a design round, either system design or the design of classes and interfaces for a feature. Each interviewer tends to ask a few questions about past work too: a project you are proud of, a time you learnt something fast, a disagreement in a team. A final conversation with the hiring manager is common.
Microsoft talks publicly about a growth mindset, and interviewers often look for it: how you respond to a hint, whether you learn from a wrong turn in the same round. Formats differ by team, level and country; your recruiter has the details of your loop.
How it is scored
After the 60-minute round, the interviewer marks each line below 1 to 5 in your written report, due within 24 hours, with notes on what you said and wrote behind each mark. The verdict is one of Strong hire, Hire, Lean hire, Lean no hire or No hire.
| Skill (1 to 5) | What the interviewer looks for |
|---|---|
| Problem solving | You clarify, try examples and reach a sound approach, taking hints well when stuck. |
| Code quality | Correct, readable code with clear structure and names. |
| Testing and edge cases | You test with your own cases, including empty and boundary inputs, and fix bugs calmly. |
| Complexity | Correct cost analysis, and an idea of how to do better if asked. |
| Communication | You think out loud, check in, and treat the interviewer as a teammate. |
| Skill (1 to 5) | What the interviewer looks for |
|---|---|
| Requirements | You pin down what the feature must do before naming classes. |
| Object model | Classes with clear responsibilities and sensible relationships. |
| Design patterns | Patterns used where they help, and you can say why. |
| Extensibility | A new requirement fits without rewriting what is there. |
| Communication | You explain the design with a small example and take changes in your stride. |
| Skill (1 to 5) | What the interviewer looks for |
|---|---|
| Structure | Clear, concise answers with a situation, your actions and the result. |
| Ownership | You owned something end to end and can describe your decisions. |
| Collaboration | Real examples of working across a team, helping others and handling disagreement. |
| Impact | You can say what changed because of your work. |
| Self-awareness | You show how you learn from feedback and mistakes. |
Practice questions in a Microsoft style
Written by us in the style of these rounds, not taken from real interviews. In a mock, the interviewer picks one at your level and follows your answers.
- Reverse the words in a sentence in place, keeping the spaces as they are.Careful index work, handling repeated spaces, and testing the edges.
- Given a binary tree, return the values you would see looking at it from the right side.Level-order traversal or depth-first search, and a clear explanation of either.
- Merge overlapping calendar events for one person, then for a whole team.Sorting by start time, merging, and extending the idea to many lists.
- Design the classes for a document editor that supports undo and redo.A command pattern or similar, and how you would add new kinds of edit.
- Design a service that syncs files across a user's devices.Change detection, conflict handling and what happens when a device is offline for days.
- Tell me about a time you had to learn a new technology quickly to deliver something.How you learnt, what you shipped and what you would do differently.
- Describe feedback that was hard to hear and what you did with it.Openness, a concrete change and its result.
How to rehearse it with a Revvox package
Most people take the Standard package: three 60-minute rounds. A report after every round means each round can practise what the last one found.
- Round one: coding. A data structures problem on a shared pad, with time to test and discuss trade-offs.
- Round two: design. System design for experienced roles, or low-level design of classes for a feature at junior and mid levels.
- Round three: hiring-manager style. Past projects, collaboration and learning, with a short technical question to finish.
How to prepare
- Practise common data structures until you can code them without notes: linked lists, trees, hash maps, heaps and graphs.
- Ask two or three clarifying questions before coding, every time, until it is a habit.
- Prepare a project you can explain in depth: what it did, your part, the hardest bug and what you would change.
- Have a story about learning something new quickly and one about receiving hard feedback.
- For design rounds, practise both a service-level design and a class-level design, since either can appear.
Common mistakes in Microsoft-style rounds
- Coding silently. The interviewer needs to hear your reasoning to score it.
- Ignoring a hint, or arguing with it, instead of trying it.
- Describing a project only at a high level and struggling when asked about your own code.
- Leaving no time to test, then missing a simple edge case.