Microsoft Interview Experience for Software Engineering Intern

Recently Microsoft visited our college to select candidates for the roles of Summer Intern in July 2023. The entire process was virtual and was conducted in 2 rounds mainly.

Coding Round

We had to solve 2 questions within 110 minutes. The first question was from binary search on answer and the second one was from recursion. The questions were the same for all and a total of 35 students were shortlisted out of 250+ students.

Interview Round 1

This was a technical round that started with a brief introduction about myself and my projects. The interviewer then asked what data structures were used in my project. He asked me questions about map and unordered_map and how they are implemented and questions about their time complexity and collisions in hashing. Then he shared a link and gave me a question to connect the next pointer in a binary tree.I first gave him a BFS approach to link the next pointers. I made sure I was using meaningful variable names, giving proper indentation, and writing comments wherever necessary. Finishing the implementation we had a dry run of the code, the interviewer acknowledged my solution and gave me a follow-up to solve it with another approach. With the help of some clues, I came up with a solution using recursion. Lastly, the interviewer asked me if I had any questions. This round was around 45-50 mins.

Interview Round 2

After 4 hours I was called for the second round. The interviewer asked me about my coding journey, favorite subjects, etc. Then he asked me to give a brief introduction about my project. Then we had a detailed discussion about the project including which data structures were used, issues in the project, the choice of tech stack, and problems the project would face if we scale it up for a large number of users. He asked me to share my screen and asked me to explain certain sections of the code and how they were tested. Lastly, the interviewer asked if I had any questions. This round was around 50-55 mins.

Results were out on the same day.9 students were selected and I was fortunate to be one of them.

Tips

1) Know the basics of Data Structures-implementation, and time complexity.

2) Keep interacting with the interviewer and speak out your thought process.

3) Try to reach out to the interviewer for hints/clues if you get stuck in an approach.

4) Be thorough with the projects in your CV.

Thank you for reading the post. Hope this will help you in your own interviews. Cheers!