Microsoft Corporation SDE-2 Interview Questions, Process, and Tips

Round duration - 60 Minutes
Round difficulty - Easy

Q1. 
Next Greater Element Problem Statement
Given a list of integers of size N, your task is to determine the Next Greater Element (NGE) for every element. The Next Greater Element for an element X is the firs...read more
Ans. 
Find the Next Greater Element for each element in a list of integers.
• Iterate through the list of integers from right to left.

• Use a stack to keep track of elements for which the Next Greater Element is not yet found.

• Pop elements from the stack until a greater element is found or the stack is empty.

• Assign the Next Greater Element as the top element of the stack or -1 if the stack is empty.
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Q2. 
Clone Linked List with Random Pointer
Your task is to create a deep copy of a linked list, where each node has two pointers: one that points to the next node in the list, and a 'random' pointer which can ...read more
Ans. 
Create a deep copy of a linked list with random pointers.
• Iterate through the original linked list and create a new node for each node in the list.

• Store the mapping of original nodes to their corresponding new nodes.

• Update the next and random pointers of the new nodes based on the mapping.

• Return the head of the newly created deep copied linked list.
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Round duration - 60 Minutes
Round difficulty - Medium

Q1. 
Smallest Window Problem Statement
Given two strings S and X containing random characters, the task is to find the smallest substring in S which contains all the characters present in X.
Input:
The first...read more
Ans. 
The task is to find the smallest substring in string S which contains all the characters present in string X.
• Iterate through string S and keep track of characters in X using a hashmap

• Use two pointers to maintain a sliding window with all characters from X

• Update the window size and start index when a valid window is found
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Q2. 
Connect Nodes at Same Level Problem Statement
Given a binary tree, connect all adjacent nodes at the same level by populating each node's 'next' pointer to point to its next right node. If there is no nex...read more
Ans. 
Connect adjacent nodes at the same level in a binary tree by populating each node's 'next' pointer.
• Traverse the tree level by level using a queue.

• For each node, connect it to the next node in the queue.

• Set the 'next' pointer of the last node in each level to NULL.

• Use constant extra space and do not alter the node structure.
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Round duration - 60 Minutes
Round difficulty - Easy

Q1. 
Closest Palindrome Problem Statement
You are given a string 'S' that represents a number. Your task is to find the closest palindromic number to this integer represented by 'S'. The closest number is defi...read more
Ans. 
Find the closest palindromic number to a given integer represented by a string.
• Convert the string to an integer and iterate to find the closest palindromic number.

• Check for palindromic numbers by reversing the digits and comparing with the original number.

• Handle cases where multiple closest palindromic numbers exist by choosing the smaller one.
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Round duration - 60 Minutes
Round difficulty - Medium

Q1. 
Minimum Operation Needed to Convert to the Given String
You are given two strings str1 and str2. Determine the minimum number of operations required to transform str1 into str2.
Explanation:
An operatio...read more
Ans. 
Determine the minimum number of operations needed to transform one string into another by moving characters to the end.
• Iterate through each character in str1 and check if it matches the first character in str2. If it does, calculate the number of operations needed to move it to the end.

• If no match is found for the first character in str2, return -1 as transformation is not possible.

• Repeat the process for each test case...read more
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Q2. 
Snake and Ladder Problem Statement
Given a Snake and Ladder Board with 'N' rows and 'N' columns filled with numbers from 1 to N*N starting from the bottom left of the board, and alternating direction each...read more
Ans. 
Find the minimum number of dice throws required to reach the last cell on a Snake and Ladder board.
• Use Breadth First Search (BFS) to explore all possible paths with minimum dice throws.

• Keep track of visited cells and the number of dice throws needed to reach each cell.

• Consider the effect of snakes and ladders on the next position.

• Return the minimum number of dice throws needed to reach the last cell.

• If it is impossible
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Q3. Can you provide a high-level design of a web crawler?
Ans. 
A web crawler is a program that systematically browses the internet to index and collect information from websites.
• Start by identifying the target websites to crawl

• Implement a queue to manage the URLs to be crawled

• Use a crawler algorithm to visit and extract data from web pages

• Implement a mechanism to handle duplicate URLs and avoid infinite loops

• Consider implementing a robots.txt parser to respect website crawling rul
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Round duration - 70 Minutes
Round difficulty - Medium

Q1. Design a system that can efficiently handle millions of requests to save or update a key-value pair, as well as millions of requests to read the value of a key.
Ans. 
Design a system to handle millions of requests for key-value operations efficiently.
• Use a distributed key-value store like Redis or Cassandra for storing data.

• Implement sharding to distribute data across multiple nodes for scalability.

• Use caching mechanisms like Memcached to reduce read latency.

• Implement load balancing to evenly distribute incoming requests.

• Use asynchronous processing for write operations to improve pe...read more
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