Let's begin with what structured English and Pseudo Code are. Structured English is the native English language. Its primary purpose is to write the structure of a program module. It uses programming language keywords to achieve this. On the other hand, Pseudo Code is like a programming language without the syntax of any specific language. This question can come in different forms, and each Microsoft hiring manager will ask it differently, but essentially they are asking the same question. Pseudocode is a kind of structured English used for describing algorithms. It describes the entire logic of an algorithm so that when implementation happens, it is translated line by line into source code. This is an algorithm question that the Microsoft hiring manager asks to see if you're old school and if you've written code in Lisp, FORTRAN, or C programming language. This tells the manager how you approach a project, whether it's task structured or methodology driven. Either is not a wrong answer, but you want to ask the interviewer what type of development organization they run early in the interview so you can answer accordingly.