Microsoft Corporation Interview Questions, Process, and Tips

Round: Test
Experience: Very easy test
Tips: Prepare well for trees and linked lists related questions.
Duration: 90 minutes
Total Questions: 15+2

Round: Technical Interview
Experience: The experience was not so good and I am surprised to get selected.
Tips: Go unprepared and answer questions without feeling any stress as the questions are easy. But stress makes them difficult.

Duration: 2
College Name: IIT Madras
Motivation: Work related to ML was my basic motivation

Round: Test
Experience: Easy
Tips: Read data strucuctures and Alogorithms
Duration: 30 minutes
Total Questions: 15

Round: Group Discussion
Experience: Good.
Tips: Think of design
Duration: 60 minutes

Round: Technical Interview
Experience: Good
Tips: Read data structures and algorithms

General Tips: Learn Data structures and Algorithms welll.
Skill Tips: Know Data structures and Algorithms
Skills: Data structures and Algorithms, General coding and problem solving
Duration: 2
College Name: IIT Madras

Round: Test
Experience: The first round was in multiple choice format. Most of the questions were from I/O in C , C++ and Java. There were few questions on operating systems and other topics in CS. Most of them were easy and the only factor is time. You have exactly 30 mins to solve 15 MCQs.
Tips: Be prepared in C , C++ and Java. If you are new to any of these languages , at least have a look at the basic input output functions.
In my class they basically selected everybody to the coding round. However it is always good to write as best as you can since they look at cumulative score at the end.
Duration: 30 minutes
Total Questions: 15

Round: Test
Experience: There was a coding round for the selected students. In my class everyone was selected to this round.There were 2 questions :

1 ) Given a Binary tree find sum of data at all the boundary nodes. A boundary node was defined , which basically evaluates to any node on the left most path , right most path and the leaves.

2) Given 2 numbers in a linked list form i.e each digit of a number in a node of the linked list , return the linked list that is the difference of the two input linked lists.
Tips: Coding is only perfected by practice. Have a good understanding of Data structures and common algorithmic paradigms including DP , Divide and Conquer, greedy etc.
Duration: 60 minutes
Total Questions: 2

Round: Group Discussion
Experience: Here's the deal : The group of students selected are seated in a big room. A problem statement is put up as a power point slide ,and you are expected to come up with appropriate data structures and algorithms to solve the problem. There are mentors who assist you ( if needed ). You have to explain your approach and write a (psuedo) code for your idea.

In my case the problem statement was as follows :
"Consider a game as follows : There is a 4X4 size game board. On each slot in the board a dice is placed. The dice has a character ( a ,b ,c .. ) printed on it. There is a character on every side of the dice. Now find all the words that can be made (in the wordament game style ) by the characters on the top face of the 16 dices. Now also write a shuffle function that shuffles the board.
Tips: It was an easy backtracking question. If you can improve your data structure , it would fetch you extra points.
Duration: 60 minutes

Round: Technical Interview
Experience: Basically I applied for a machine learning profile. So all the technical questions were from basics of ML. If you have good basics in ML , the interview is very easy. I was doing ML this semester only. So he might have limited with basics :P
Tips: Tell your mentor if you are not aware of a particular approach to ML classification( or regression) . He ll teach you the basics(literally :P ) and then ask questions.

Round: Technical Interview
Experience: It is okay if you don't come up with great model. I only knew about Linear Regression and modeled it accordingly.
I took --- > Y = ( Demand/Availability) as my output variable and identified a few input parameters. He was satisfied with that :P

In the third question he elaborated a little more on Bias and variance.
Tips: Basic ML is more than enough.

General Tips: Be confident. Dress properly for interviews. If you get the internship more than happy. If not : remember this " Success is going from failure to failure WITHOUT losing enthusiasm"
Skills: Algorithms , Data Structures, Machine Learning, C, C++, Java
Duration: 2
College Name: IIT Madras
Motivation: My long term goal is to be a data scientist. So an ML profile at Microsoft was the best thing I could get now :P

Round: Test
Experience: Microsoft conducted their first round of shortlisting for placements and internship. The online coding round was organized by CoCubes like last year.The test was for 1.5 hrs and had 2 coding questions. Allowed programming languages were C, C++ and Java.The questions were as follows:1) Given the head of two linked lists , find the merging point of both the linked lists. In case the linked lists do not merge then return NULL.2) Given a 2d array of 0s and 1s where 0s represent water and 1s represent land. A connected patch of 0s count as one single water body and if a water body is covered by 1s all around it then it forms one pool. Write a function to return the total number of pools in the 2D matrix. In case a water body is present on the boundary of the array immediately return -1.Sample test cases :-Input :
11111
10101
10111
11111
11111
Output : 2

Input :
11110
11111
11011
11011
Output : -1

Input :
11111
10111
10011
11011
11111
Output : 1
Duration: 90 minutes
Total Questions: 2

College Name: NA

Round: Test
Experience: Varying level of difficulty. 15 MCQs. Topics: C/C++, data structures, DBMS, OS, Networking
Total Questions: 15

Round: Test
Experience: Two coding questions were given. Fairly simple. One was to print nth element from last in a linked list. Other was to convert a number to base 4 number

Round: Technical Interview
Experience: Telephonic Round

He asked me about myself, and a couple of questions from ethical hacking(I had written about it in my CV). Then he asked me to develop an online chess game. The entire class definition, data structures to be used and graphics implementation etc were discussed.The interviews were held in a college in Delhi.

Round: Technical Interview
Experience: Firstly he asked me about myself, then my projects. Then he asked me to write a code to remove comments from a C file. Then he asked me the approach to detect a loop in a linked list. Then he asked me to design a system that would add two polynomials.He gave me a very tough question of graphs. It was similar to a traveling salesman problem but had two paths, one path or no path to every other city. One possible way of reaching the other city was via plane and the other was a taxi. The salesman had a fixed number of coupons for both taxi and plane. He had to save maximum coupons at the end. Then, test cases for this problem. I wasn’t the only interviewee in this round. I had another person sitting next to me. He was rejected while I made it through.

College Name: NA

Round: Test
Experience: Most from C/C++. Few from OS
Duration: 30 minutes
Total Questions: 15

Round: Test
Experience: 1st quest: ----- quest: -----/
Top 20 students were selected for the next round. 8 had direct interviews while the rest 12 of us had another elimination round. The selection was done using the total score of both the online rounds
Duration: 20 minutes
Total Questions: 02

Round: Test
Experience: Write the code implementing a queue using stacks.
Duration: 20 minutes

Round: Technical Interview
Experience: The interviews were on in parallel and when I went for my 1st interviews some were already rejected while some even had their 2nd and 3rd interview rounds.

Suppose you have an array of elements which has duplicates except 1 number, ex. 1,2,3,4,3,2,1. You need write a pseudo code to find the unique number. Here ans – 4. Also asked the complexity of my code which was O (n).Tell the pseudo code to reverse a linked list.
Q . I started to make the logic for O (n) but he said it might not be possible to do it in 1 iteration so not an issue. But I gave him the logic of O (n) and 1 iteration.You have a matrix a[m] [n]. Transpose it into a matrix b[n] [m] in minimum iterations. I could think of m*n/4 at most.
Difference between abstract classes and interface. Gave cases for me to tell the error or right ans in abstract classes.DBMS: 5th largest salary of employees from a given table. I answered using rownum and then limit but he wanted a general ans. So all I could tell was using nested query.
Puzzles:– There are 4 people who want to cross a bridge. Minimum time they take to cross a bridge is 1, 2, 7 and 11 respectively. There is only 1 torch and at most 2 people can cross a bridge at a time. But no one can cross the bridge without torch (Someone has to come back to give the torch). Find minimum time in which all 4 cross the bridge.
2nd puzzle I 1st answered 22 but then corrected myself and answered 18 (1 and 2 cross. 1 comes back. 7 and 11 cross. 2 comes back. 1 and 2 cross – total time 2 + 1 + 11 + 2 + 2 = 18).I was informed 5 minutes after my interview to be ready for the 2nd Round

Round: Technical Interview
Experience: Write a code to delete x elements after 1st n elements.
I wrote the code but missed the case where n = 0. So as he was checking the code I told him the case I had missed. He was confused if the code would work if there were less than n + x elements but I showed him that it would.Was a short interview compared to others and was scared of being rejected but finally was called for the hr interview in sometime.

Round: HR Interview
Experience: He first told me about the code I had written in the elimination round that it was the best code he got in the day. Finally after the whole day of interview I was selected with 1 more guy from our college.

College Name: NA