Microsoft Corporation Sde1 Interview Questions and Answers

Round: Test
Experience: 3 questions were given
1. Rain water collection problem
2. Matrix DFS problem
3. DP problem
Tips: Practice all standard questions on practice.geeksforgeeks.org.
And other dp questions on Hackerearth and Hackerrank.
Duration: 1 hour 30 minutes
Total Questions: 3

Round: Group fly round
Experience: 2 questions were given
1. Convert number into words. Eg. 389 to Three hundred and eighty nine. Input 1-999999
2. A 2-D matrix nxn consisting of numbers is spirally sorted in decreasing order. So given a number we have to insert into the matrix so that the matrix is still sorted spirally. Write a function.
Tips: Also practice ad hoc questions

Round: Technical Interview
Experience: In my implementation he thought there was some scope for improvement. I implemented the date of issue and date of return both in the books entity. I then suggested to implement an borrowed_books entity and he seemed very satisfied with it.
Tips: High

Round: Technical Interview
Experience: I asked about the definition of similarity wrt the question. He replied to define it myself. So, I told him that I would find the LCS of the 2 strings and then define a threshold below/above which "we" could say them to be dissimilar/similar. There was a confusion there. I realised my mistake and stated it to be Longest Common Subsequence. He asked me to write the code. After I was done. He told me that the code was incorrect. I went through the code thrice and then I told him whether he could point out the mistakes. There were none. He was trying to see how I reacted. I didn't get too defensive. He was happy with it. Then he asked me to optimize the code. I said that for letters that didn't match in both the strings, we could define some similarity score between individual letters. He said yes it is definitely a good optimization but can you think of something simpler. I then told him that we need to normalize the LCS. He was happy that I could work on the hints he provided.
Tips: Don't get too defensive.
Listen to each and every word that the interviewer utters carefully.
Try to talk through the solution with the interviewer. Don't let a moment of awkward silence come during the interview.
Think of the interviewer as a friend with whom you are discussing a coding question. It eases out 90% of the tension.

College Name: IIT Varanasi