Microsoft Corporation Interview Questions, Process, and Tips

Round duration - 90 Minutes
Round difficulty - Medium

Conducted on https://tests.mettl.com/ and contains 3 coding questions with different difficulty levels – Basic, Easy, and Medium and carrying marks accordingly.

Those who had solved at least 2 questions were selected for the next round. I was able to solve all of them and around 90 students were selected for the next round.

Q1. 
Division to N Decimal Places
Your task is to compute the division of two integers, X / Y, and output the result formatted to contain exactly N decimal places.
Input:
The first line contains an integer ‘...read more
Ans. 
Compute the division of two integers and output the result formatted to contain exactly N decimal places.
• Read the input values for X, Y, and N

• Perform the division X / Y

• Format the result to contain exactly N decimal places

• Output the result as a string with N decimal places
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Q2. 
Longest Palindromic Substring Problem Statement
You are provided with a string STR of length N. The goal is to identify the longest palindromic substring within this string. In cases where multiple palind...read more
Ans. 
Given a string, find the longest palindromic substring, prioritizing the one with the smallest start index.
• Iterate through the string and expand around each character to find palindromes

• Keep track of the longest palindrome found and its starting index

• Return the longest palindromic substring with the smallest start index
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Q3. 
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. 
Find the smallest substring in a given string that contains all characters from another given string.
• Use a sliding window approach to find the smallest window in S that contains all characters in X.

• Maintain a frequency map for characters in X and a window map for characters in the current window.

• Slide the window to the right, updating the window map and shrinking the window from the left if all characters in X are pres...read more
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Round duration - 60 Minutes
Round difficulty - Medium

It was a pen and paper-based round. 2 questions were given, and we have to solve them efficiently and specify our approach clearly.

Those who had solved both the problems efficiently and able to explain their ideas clearly were shortlisted for further rounds. 24 students selected for the interviews.

Q1. 
Connect Nodes at the Same Level
Given a binary tree where each node has at most two children, your task is to connect all adjacent nodes at the same level. You should populate each node's 'next' pointer t...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 level, connect nodes from left to right using their 'next' pointers.

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

• Example: For the given binary tree, connect nodes 2->3, 4->5, 5->6, and set 1, 3, 6 'next' pointers to NULL.
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Q2. 
Minimum Number of Platforms Problem
Your task is to determine the minimum number of platforms required at a railway station so that no train has to wait.
Explanation:
Given two arrays:
• AT - represent...read more
Ans. 
Determine the minimum number of platforms needed at a railway station so that no train has to wait.
• Sort the arrival and departure times arrays in ascending order.

• Use two pointers to iterate through the arrays and keep track of the number of platforms needed.

• Increment the number of platforms needed when a train arrives and decrement when a train departs.

• Return the maximum number of platforms needed at any point.
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Round duration - 70 minutes
Round difficulty - Medium

This was an MCQ and coding round. For MCQs this was the distribution : -

Apptitude ( 10 questions)
Maths (10 questions)
Coding Fundamentals (10 questions)

Round duration - 60 minutes
Round difficulty - Hard

This was also an MCQ and coding test. 30 MCQs were asked

Q1. 
Validate BST Problem Statement
Given a binary tree with N nodes, determine whether the tree is a Binary Search Tree (BST). If it is a BST, return true; otherwise, return false.
A binary search tree (BST)...read more
Ans. 
Validate if a binary tree is a Binary Search Tree (BST) or not.
• Check if the left subtree of a node contains only nodes with data less than the node's data.

• Check if the right subtree of a node contains only nodes with data greater than the node's data.

• Ensure that both the left and right subtrees are also binary search trees.

• Traverse the tree in an inorder manner and check if the elements are in sorted order.

• Use recursio...read more
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Q1. Why Microsoft? What products do you use?
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Q1. Discussion on projects written in resume and related problems. Some stats
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