Microsoft Interview Experience for Software Engineer Intern (On-Campus)

Round 1- Online Technical Test: Including 2 Coding Questions of equal weightage both of which were medium difficulty level.

Round 2- Offline-interview round: The Interviewer asked first asked me about a DSA problem. The problem was based on finding the longest subarray with consecutive elements. It was similar (not exactly the same) to this problem on GFG: Length of longest subarray with increasing contiguous elements – GeeksforGeeks

I was first asked the brute force solution for this which I was easily able to tell. The next question was whether I can give a better approach, so, I presented an O(n) solution to the interviewer. The next thing he asked me was whether I could actually do this in a single pass of the array. I started to explain whatever came to my mind and finally, I was able to do it using some flag variables. The interviewer also asked me to use meaningful names for the variables as I was using names like flag1, flag2, etc.

Then I was asked about some concepts in operating systems like paging, page faults, etc. The interviewer then asked me about semaphores and asked me to write the pseudocode for semaphores and explain with an example how it works.

Next, I was asked some basic questions about Databases which were common conceptual questions from DBMS and anyone who knows definitions of things can answer them.

After that, the interviewer asked me if I knew about protocols like the TCP/IP protocol to which I replied that these concepts fall under computer networks which had not been taught in my college till my second year, so I did not know the answer to that question. The interview then ended.

Round 3- Online-interview round: The interviewer was very friendly and asked me first about my technical interests. Then, the interviewer started talking about my resume and asked me about the coding languages I knew. I replied that I am proficient in C++, C, JAVA, and Python. So, the interviewer asked me about my most preferred language out of all these to which I replied C++. Then, he asked me why C++ was my preferred language and why not the other languages. Then, she talked about my projects and asked me to elaborate on my DBMS project. I told her the basic things that I included in my DBMS project. Then the interviewer asked me to explain how I designed it and what were the difficulties I faced during the project. Since it was a team project, the interviewer then asked me about my individual contribution in the project. The interviewer then talked about the scalability of my code and whether or not my code was maintainable. After that, the interviewer asked me a couple of questions about scheduling schemes in OS. and asked me my best 2 and worst 2 rated scheduling schemes with reason. She also gave me some scenarios and asked me about the scheduling schemes I would choose for those scenarios. Then, she asked me whether I can build custom datatypes in C++ and asked me to implement one custom datatype. after that, the interviewer asked a couple of HR questions, and then the interview ended.