I applied through a recruiter. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Microsoft (Hyderābād) in Apr 2012
Interview
A recruiter reached me via linkedin and scheduled a f2f interview two days later in a hotel. Had five rounds of technical discussion (each 1 hour) and they told there may be one more round (may be technical). 1week later they scheduled a video call with a director (but it was actually an audio only with screen sharing). We talked about some design level ideas then he asked a technical question. I was running into trouble to setup the video call because I'd a mac (hope you understand because the video call tool was developed by MS).
Interview questions [5]
Question 1
Imagine there are n cities (say c1, c2....cn) connected circularly and each of them has a petrol bunk (say p1,p2...pn). The distance between each cities are d1, d2...dn. Here 1unit of petrol will be used to travel 1unit of distance. You can start from any city so that you can go through all of them and reach the same location (city). Find from where we've to begin the navigation.
FOR EXAMPLE:
c1-->c2-->c3-->c1
p1 has 2ltr
p2 has 10ltr
p3 has 4ltr
and the distance between each cities:
c1<-->c2: 3
c2<-->c3: 2
c3<-->c1: 8
Here we've to start at c2 in-order to come back again to the same place.
Explain the logic to find whether u can come back to the same location. Find where to start. Write a program for the same. Write test cases for the same.
You're converting a string (s1) into another (s2) by changing the characters in s1. You can do add/delete/replace the characters of s1 to get s2. The cost of any of those operation for a character is 1. Find the minimum cost to convert s1 into s2. Write program and test cases for the same.
For example: Convert "Hi" into "Hey". This would require minimum two cost.
1. Replace 'i' with 'e' in s1
2. Add 'y' to s1.
Now we've s2.
Write a program to iterate through a 2D grid in a spiral way. Since I can't attach images here, I'll explain it using an array. Imagine you've a nxm matrix of bytes. you've iterate through it in a spiral way. It means, iterate the first row (left to right), then iterate through the right most column (top-bottom) then iterate the bottom most row (right-left) until you reach the center of the matrix. Hope its clear now.
You've a singly linked list where every node in the list has a field "random" which points to other node in the same list. Write a function to clone this list (create a new copy of the same). Don't use extra space (just the pointer variables are fine).
Some other standard questions:
1. Given a BST and a range, print all the numbers that comes in that range.
Ex: the function will be something like: print(node * head, int x, int y);
It has to print all numbers within the rage x&y
2. Print max height (level) of a binary search tree.
3. Given an array of integers, determine the sub array which makes max sum.
4. Find LCA of the binary search tree.
It started with a 90-minute online assessment, followed by a technical phone screen with one engineer. The OA covered two medium-to-hard algorithm problems. For coding practice, I mainly rely on "LeetCode" to cover different topics. For company-specific interview preparation, I use "Hack2Hire", "LeetCode Discuss", and "1Point3Acres" to find any recent original questions. All of them are helpful platforms. The phone screen included one coding problem and some discussion around edge cases and time complexity.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Given a list of meeting time intervals, determine if a person could attend all meetings.
I applied online. The process took 1 week. I interviewed at Microsoft in Dec 2024
Interview
I was invited to a technical interview with Microsoft. The interviewer started with a general question: “What happens when you type google.com into your browser?” They asked a few follow-up questions related to that.
After that, they gave me a LeetCode algorithmic question, which was at a hard level. The problem was “Integer to English Words.”
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
1. What happens when you type google.com into your browser?
2. “Integer to English Words” – LeetCode algorithmic question
Three tech interviews + one hiring manager VO, most of questions are medium to hard leetcode questions. Ask some questions about techniques you written on the resume. But I think they care more about the match of the research and the job.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Tell me about the recommendation System you made for the work.