Microsoft Engage Interview Experience for Internship

Hello everyone!

A few days back, I gave my interview for Microsoft Software Development Engineer(SDE) Internship, via the Microsoft Intern Engage Mentorship Program, and shared my experience here.

Technical Interview: The duration of the interview- is 45 minutes.

Questions asked:

Firstly, the interviewer introduced himself quickly and then asked about my previous project which I had mentioned in my resume(not the engage project).
Then, he directly jumped to coding problems. The questions were:

• A slight variation of https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/find-maximum-path-sum-two-leaves-binary-tree/ –Given a binary tree, find the minimum sum from one leaf node to another leaf node. He asked for an approach and discussed some test cases, but did not tell me to code and moved on to the next problem after that.
• https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/maximum-distance-between-peaks-in-given-linked-list/ –Given a linked list, find the maximum distance between 2 peak nodes of the list. He asked for an approach and then told me to improve its complexity and give an optimized approach. After being satisfied with my approach, he asked me to code it.

After this, he asked “Why do you want to join Microsoft? “ Finally, he talked a bit about Microsoft and ended the interview.

Few learnings from the interview:

• Always be confident while answering any question, it shows that you have communication skills as well as you are well prepared.
• Don’t give the optimized approach to a coding problem directly. First, give the least optimized brute-force approach, and then come over to the optimized one.
• Be well acquainted with the implementation, coding techniques, or tech stack used in the project, because questions might be asked in quite detail.

That’s it. This was my whole experience. All the best 🙂