I applied through college or university. The process took 1 day. I interviewed at Microsoft (Seattle, WA) in Feb 2012
Interview
Standard 4 back to back interview process, Questions were not very tough but they expected for proper code. Note: you have to write code in white board.
Prepare interview questions (from glassdoor, cracking coding interview, careercup etc) and practice writing in whitepaper. And follow recent interview questions from Microsoft.
Interview questions [4]
Question 1
1. Given two sets, find intersection and subtraction
• A intersection B
• A - B
• B - A
Find all in single function, traverse the sets only once
function(string[] a, string[] b)
a ={"abc", "def"} ; b = {"def", "xyz"}
a intersection B = {"def"}
a - b = {"abc"}
b - a = {"xyz"}
2. Do same function in multi-processor environment
How to improve performance / parallelization ? How to use locks
3. Do same function in distributed environment ( in multiple machine env)
Some discussion about bloom filters and how to improve performance
4. Questions about database live migration project,
How create and update statements work during live migration ?
5. Search in Rotated Sorted array
Will this work in all cases ?
check in this case => 7 7 7 7 7 7 1 7 7 7 7
Asked me to write code for this ..
6. Find a word in N x N word board
bool find(char[][] board, char word)
7. Given a function name, its number of arguments and possible options for each arguments, generate all combination of test cases
fun(int a, int b, int c)
a can take {1,2,3}
b can take {4,5}
c can take {6,7,8,9}
We have to generate all 24 combinations.
8. Design question,
Monitor tool for checking the number of requests and size of data got by each user, and reporting if an user exceed limit (number and size).
You have N number of front end servers getting the requests from LB. front end servers contact back end servers for serving the requests.
9. Serialize a BST and search for a key from the file
Performance : average log(n)
Node structure
struct Node {
Node *left;
Node *right;
int key;
char* string;
}
In file u can use below functions
seek(number of bytes) -> moves to n bytes from current location
read() -> reads one byte
I applied through college or university. The process took 4 weeks. I interviewed at Microsoft (San Diego, CA) in Mar 2015
Interview
I had a good ranking in the Microsoft College Code Competition and got the interview. Microsoft's recruiting is really slow. They gave me the interview very late, and now it has been 3 weeks since the interview, I haven't heard a thing from them. I may choose other company at the end.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Asked me to introduce my pertinent experiences. After that there was a very easy coding question. Give you an array, find the two numbers that are closest to each other. Return the smallest pair if there are more than one solutions.
I applied through college or university. The process took 3 weeks. I interviewed at Microsoft
Interview
It was a great experience, the interviewer was really nice. Being the first interview I have had in a while, I was tripped up with the question. But, the interviewer gave timely hints and the process moved along smoothly and nicely! I would interview with Microsoft again!
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Sorting Question? I don't quite remember. But it was very similar to merge sort.