Microsoft Interview Experience for Internship + FTE (On-Campus) 2022-23

I want to share my interview experience with Microsoft. The company visited our campus in July 2022. There are a total of 3 rounds for the selection process and the descriptions are as follows:

Round 1 (Coding round): There are a total of 2 questions for the online coding round on Microsoft’s Codelit platform. The time duration is 90 minutes.

Question 1: This question was quite easy and could be solved with a brute force approach or an optimized sliding window approach. However, the constraints are small such that the O(n²) approach worked.

Question 2: This question is a bit logical with the concept of prefix-sum. The time complexity allowed is O(n). The link for the question is as below:

https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/count-of-subarrays-with-average-k/

Round 2 (Technical Interview – I): This interview lasted for almost 1 hour. Three questions were asked in this round.

1. This question was about the Linked List. The question was to remove duplicate elements from sorted lists. Given a sorted linked list you need to remove duplicate elements and make the final list of unique elements. They told me to explain the pseudo code and after I explained that they told me to write.

Firstly, I used the brute force approach and then optimized it to O(n) time complexity and O(1) space complexity. The interviewer was satisfied with this. Then she asked me to write different test cases possible for this question.

2. Now she asked me about common information for Graphs like different types of traversal methods in graphs and what is the difference between them. So, I told about the basic definitions of BFS, and DFS traversal. She further asked me some basic questions related to Graph, just to confirm whether I know graphs or not. She was then convinced by myself.

3. At last, she asked me questions about making a deep copy of the graph and asked me to write full code. The link is as follows:

https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/clone-an-undirected-graph/

Round 3 (Technical + HR): This round consisted of one technical questions and then some questions related to HR.

The question was given two strings like “ABAC” and “DEDF”. The problem is to tell whether the two strings are valid or not. The strings are valid if we can make exact mapping between two strings. For example, here ‘A’ is mapped to ‘D’, ‘B’ is mapped to ‘E’ and ‘C’ is mapped to ‘F’.

Given such pairs of strings, output has to be true or false whether the pair is valid or not. Firstly, I told th eapproach using map and then she told me to write code all possible test cases for this problem.

Some HR questions are as follows:

• Do you have experience in development and if yes in what technologies had you worked?
• How will you contribute to Microsoft?
• Why Microsoft should give you a chance on behalf of others?
• What are your strength and weakness ?

So, this way my two techincal rounds got completed successfully and I was selected for summer internship at Microsoft.

THe time went and between May 2023 – July 2023, I went for my internship at Microsoft, Hyderabad campus. The internship went so well and finally at September 2023, I got PPO and will be a full time employee at Microsoft from July 2024.

Some tips:

• Be confident while giving answers.
• Speak while thinking of your approach.
• Try to optimize your code and ask for help if needed, there is nothing bad in asking for help. Interviewers are always ready to provide you hints.