Microsoft Research Senior Software Manager Interview Questions and Answers

Island Perimeter and Number of Provinces. Basic Leetcode question

Round duration - 70 minutes
Round difficulty - Medium

Link was active for 24 hours, I took the test at night.
Difficulty was medium.
There were some MCQs on Springboot/Java along with 2 DSA questions.

Q1. 
Zigzag Binary Tree Traversal Problem
Given a binary tree, compute the zigzag level order traversal of the node values in the tree. The zigzag traversal requires traversing levels from left to right, then ...read more
Ans. 
Applied BFS for level order traversal.
The core logic is how to append the current level nodes in the resultList.
If currLevel is even:
then append the curr level node list as it is to the resultList
else:
reverse the curr level node list and then append to the resultList.

Finally return the resultList.
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Q2. 
K Closest Points to Origin Problem Statement
Your house is located at the origin (0,0) of a 2-D plane. There are N neighbors living at different points on the plane. Your goal is to visit exactly K neighb...read more
Ans. 
As we need to find K closest restaurants to the source (0,0), I used priority queue(MaxHeap) in python to eliminate all the farthest restaurants and have only k closest restaurants left at the end of the loop.

I had stored the elements in priority Queue as a pair [distance, coordinates], so that at I can directly get the coordinates for the k closest restaurants to return in the result.
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Round duration - 60 minutes
Round difficulty - Medium

Technical round (Questions on Java, Spring Boot, Microservices, Rest APIs, OOPs and Solid principals).

Round duration - 45 minutes
Round difficulty - Easy