Did a Microsoft hiring event and though it took 3 weeks to get back to me after the onsite, it looks like I am getting an offer. Altogether between online assessment and onsite, I received 6 technical questions and 1 behavioral interview. (This hiring event "onsite" was a little different from others, so most people only got 2 or 3 total interviews instead of 4-5, and I got 4 online assessment questions. The online assessment questions were leetcode easy but they really wanted to see a detailed commenting regarding time and space complexity and your explanation for the algorithm you came up with.) For the onsite, I was asked a question where union find was the optimal answer, I would say harder LeetCode medium, if not a LeetCode hard. I was able to devise a reasonable solution to the base problem using DFS but I had never heard of Union Find until that interview. I would have said I was on the line of pass/fail. My other question was a LeetCode easy dynamic programming problem. Dynamic programming is my best, so this question I was able to solve in 15 minutes, take another 10 minutes in an attempt to break it (it didn't break even though the interviewer tried), another 2 minutes to give a verbal solution to a harder version of the problem (interviewer felt it was too annoying to try to code up the solution to the harder problem, so he didn't ask me to do it). The behavioral interview was actually the roughest because there was some miscommunication about what kind of interview it was supposed to be, and he had to come up with questions on the spot. I have 5 years of experience in total, about 2 involved a lot of direct work with customers to come up with software requirements, and he asked a lot of questions regarding working with customers, how to accommodate customers that ask for things that don't make sense, and a time that I had to come up with a software-based solution to make working with customers more easy. These were easy to answer based on my experience.

All the teams for this event are based out of Washington.

I also have a CS degree but they did a very poor job of teaching algorithms and stuff so I pretty much learned everything by myself this year. I've never had to do these kinds of algorithm problems to get jobs before, but I wanted to increase my prestige and salary. I have only solved about 40 leetcode problems, but I've done problems elsewhere and usually practice the basics often.

I hope to use leetcode to make even bigger leaps in the future. Good luck to everyone, you can do it! My big advice for Microsoft (US) is definitely focus on your communication. Even though I felt like my second problem was so easy, I still drew a diagram to explain what I was going to code up solution wise and wrote pseudocode very quickly to confirm that solution. My interviewer commented that too many people just start writing code with not enough explanation of why they even think their algorithm will work and it makes it much harder to follow. I only spent about 2 minutes on a diagram and explanation and it made my feedback for that interview much, much stronger. And even though I didn't come up with the ideal solution to the first problem, sometimes just being friendly and having a reasonable solution is enough. The behavioral parts of interviews might be harder than they seem!