Microsoft Interview Experience for Software Engineer

Coding Round

90 minutes, 3 questions asked-

• Evaluation of Postfix Expression
• Kadane’s Algorithm of Max Subarray Sum
• Level Order of Binary Tree

Folks who solved all the Coding Problems and had a CGPA of 9.3+ were shortlisted for interviews.

Interview Round-1 (Technical)

Basic Interview Discussion for making candidate comfortable with the interviewer- Introduction, College Life, why opting for coding when from ECE and some discussion on Resume and Projects.

Then a Puzzle and DSA Problem:
Water Jug Problem: You are given two jugs, a 4-gallon one and a 3-gallon one, a pump that has unlimited water which you can use to fill the jug, and the ground on which water may be poured. Neither jug has any measuring markings on it. How can you get exactly 2 gallons of water in the 4-gallon jug? Now make it M gallon and N gallon jugs and you have to get K gallon output. Given a triplet (M,N,K) come up with instructions (like the shell commands) to get K gallon water.

Related to: https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/two-water-jug-puzzle/

I explained to him the puzzle approach first and then modified as per the need of the question. Called for next round.

Interview Round-2 (Technical)

The interviewer directly jumped to DSA.
1. Given a M X N grid of 1’s and 0’s. Find the size and location of the maximum size square sub matrix containing all 1’s.
2. Given a M X N grid containing numbers. Print the numbers in diagonal order. Ex- M = 2, N = 5 grid = [[1, 2, 3, 4, 5], [6, 7, 8, 9, 10]] output = 6, 1, 7, 2, 8, 3, 8, 4, 10, 5..
3. Given N nuts and N bolts in shuffled order but for every nut there is a bolt which matches it. How will you find all the nut bolt matches ? you can pick a nut and a bolt and test if it matches or not. I explained to him the Hashmap approach first. Later he asked me for another approach having a time complexity of O(NLogN), and I told to use a BST Map. He was satisfied, but still he asked me for another approach. I told him something similar to Quick Sort is possible. He was satisfied now, though he didn’t ask me to write code for Quick Sort. Called for the next Round

Interview Round-3 (Behavioural)

Discussion on college life mainly, how will I work in teams, preferences regarding projects and areas of interests, any other internship offers and Why Opting for Microsoft.

Verdict: SELECTED.