Microsoft interview experience Real time questions & tips from candidates to crack your interview

SDE - 1

Microsoft
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4 rounds | 6 Coding problems

Interview preparation journey

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Preparation
Duration: 3 months
Topics: System Design (HLD)Object oriented designDesign PatternData Structures (array, stack, queue, trees, linkedl list)Algorithms (most important binary search)
Tip
Tip

Tip 1 : do atleast 2-3 problems a day consistently
Tip 2 : Prepare situation based questions for projects. Nobody asks directly about the projects you have done. Examples would be amazon leadership principles.
Tip 3 : Have command over one programming language with which you could impress the interviewer.

Application process
Where: Referral
Eligibility: NA
Resume Tip
Resume tip

Tip 1 : Resume should be of one page only. Don't over do on the resume. If you have more content better keep it in pocket to explain during interview.
Tip 2 : Only put the languages which you know or have done project in. Although most of MNC's doesn't care about the programming language.
Tip3 : Best place to build resume is overleaf. Its highly maintainable easy to make and you can find so many good templates.

Interview rounds

01
Round
Medium
Face to Face
Duration60 Minutes
Interview date18 Dec 2020
Coding problem2

All rounds were taken in a single day.
8:30-9:30

1. Rotate array

Easy
25m average time
80% success
0/40
Asked in companies
Deutsche BankIBMSalesforce

Given an array 'arr' with 'n' elements, the task is to rotate the array to the left by 'k' steps, where 'k' is non-negative.


Example:
'arr '= [1,2,3,4,5]
'k' = 1  rotated array = [2,3,4,5,1]
'k' = 2  rotated array = [3,4,5,1,2]
'k' = 3  rotated array = [4,5,1,2,3] and so on.
Problem approach

Made generic method which take length for reversing array
1st full roatation
2nd n-k rotation
3rd n-k+1 to n rotation

Try solving now

2. Sorted Linked List to Balanced BST

Moderate
25m average time
70% success
0/80
Asked in companies
AppleRed HatMicrosoft

You have been given a singly linked list in which nodes are present in increasing order. Your task is to construct a Balanced Binary Search Tree with the same data elements as the given Linked List.

A Balanced BST is defined as a BST in which the height of two subtrees of every node differs no more than 1.

Problem approach

Sort the list
Start building the tree from middle as tree needs to be balanced.

Try solving now
02
Round
Medium
Face to Face
Duration60 Minutes
Interview date18 Dec 2020
Coding problem2

This was design and problem solving round
Round was taken on the same day
10:30-11:30

1. DBMS Question

Design Employees management kind of system and need to be able to query the resources assigned to the employees and query should answer for all the employees resouces which are reporting to the queried employee.

Problem approach

Tip 1: practice design patterns
Tip 2: practice object oriented programming
Tip 3: Try to keep as much abstraction as possible. Code should be decoupled.

2. Check If One String Is A Rotation Of Another String

Moderate
15m average time
85% success
0/80
Asked in companies
OracleAmazonAmerican Express

You are given two Strings 'P' and 'Q' of equal length.


Your task is to return 1 if String 'P' can be converted into String 'Q' by cyclically rotating it to the right any number of times ( Possibly Zero ), else return 0.


A cyclic rotation to the right on String 'A' consists of taking String 'A' and moving the rightmost character to the leftmost position. For example, if 'A' = "pqrst", then it will be "tpqrs" after one cyclic rotation on 'A'.


For example:
Consider the two strings 'P' = "abfyg" and 'Q' = "gabfy" 

If we cyclically rotate String 'P' to the right once. The resulting string P becomes "gabfy" which is equal to String 'Q'. 

Therefore it is possible to convert String 'P' to String 'Q'.
Problem approach

KMP string search algorithm is the most efficient way to solve this and this is exactly interviewer was expecting.

Try solving now
03
Round
Hard
Video Call
Duration60 Minutes
Interview date18 Dec 2020
Coding problem1

It was HLD round 
2:30-3:30

1. System Design Question

Design stock exchange

Problem approach

Tip 1: Need to be careful about the trade-offs transaction execution time vs transaction consistency. 
Tip 2: Data Sharding and calculations are important.
Tip 3: Read about the load balancer.

04
Round
Easy
Video Call
Duration45 minutes
Interview date18 Dec 2020
Coding problem1

This was hiring manager round. General discussion about projects.

1. System Design Question

Design an API which could give the microsoft about user mobile usage and help in increasing user's interaction.

Problem approach

Tip 1: It was more of a general discussion as my previous organization was samsung and i was working in mobile devision.
Tip 2: Caching was important and how you explain about the data transfer.

Here's your problem of the day

Solving this problem will increase your chance to get selected in this company

Skill covered: Programming

How do you remove whitespace from the start of a string?

Choose another skill to practice
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