little 'bout me - graduated on may 2021, and started applying kinda late like around the when i graduated - one of my mistakes i believe. right now i am working in Southeastern US at a mid-size company as mobile developer, this is my first job. i have done around ~150 leetcode questions. now i can chill from it a bit, until then.

Position: New Grad Software Engineer
Application: linkedIn -> applied through microsoft careers website

FIRST ROUND TECHNICAL PHONE SCREEN

• Date: Nov 2021
  • Questions:
    • Tell me about your self, which course at university I enjoyed the most(what area are you passionate about) and he asked about which platform like a website I would change and how would it look like.
    • The coding question was done on Codility, the first part was just to search an element so I implemented a binary search there was a leading question but I forgot what it exactly was.

SCHEDULING ISSUES

Microsoft responded in around a week that I passed the screening.
I initially scheduled the final round for Nov 2021, but it got cancelled for some reason. Then I started working at a midsize company as I could not find any feasible date at that time.
They emailed sometime around early Dec but I forgot to reply in time, literally emailed them right after they had emailed not responded so we will not be moving forward with interviews. They did email back saying that there was no interview slot this month but they will let me know if there was any next month.
So, on Jan 2022 I randomly checked the action center, and there it said that the application was withdrawn. Emailed them about this issue they said it was a mistake, then finally i was able to get to schedule my interviews.

FINAL ROUND

Team: OneDrive and SharePoint
Number of Interviews: 4

1. Interview 1: There was no coding question here. Talking about making a scalable application.
2. Interview 2: Basic interview questions, like tell me about an issue you had in a team, this was ~10 min. Coding question was about print the number of frequencies of an element in an array. I implemented it using a hashmap, time complexity of O(N) and Space Complexity of O(N). Follow up question, what if we had less space available? The answer I thought was that we could do a nested loop and print them at the end of the second loop, in the 2nd loop we will count if that element matches. Interviewer suggested that this will cause the printing of duplicate number, so i solved it by just removing the element if its duplicate was found. Second follow-up, how would i scale this in a distributed environment, i said we could divide the array in parts and then these could be processed individually and then finally we could just merge the output by summing them. Interviewer liked the response.
3. Interview 3: Basic interview question, tell me about yourself and tell me about an issue you had in a team, this was ~10 min. Next ~30 min there was a coding question this was of medium-hard difficulty for me.
   We have 2 arrays:
   vector<vector<int>> friends; // here each index tells us the friends of it
vector<vector<string>> watched; // movies watched by each person (index)
   Find the movies watched at level from index.
   index: the starting point
   level: this can be thought of levels in a level order traversal.
   So, we basically need just this level.
   The output level must be ordered by frequency.
   Function Declaration: vector<string> levelMovies(vector<vector<int>> friends, vector<vector<string>> watched, int level, int index)
   My Approach:
   I thought of this as a graph, so I went for a modified BFS. The interviewer was super helpful throughout. Did make a mistake that was I forgot about the visited array to keep track of the nodes that were visited.
4. Interview 4: Deep Dive of my passion in development, why microsoft and what did i think about the previous coding interviews and what mistake did i make.

TIPS

Ask question throughout the interview and especially at the end of the interview.
Read the company culture on the careers page, make connection with your stories to it.
As these interviews are on MS Teams you can have the job description and the company culture page open for reference during the interview

Conclusion

Really enjoyed the final round, but I was surprised by the focus on system design knowledege required at this level.
I received the offer in around 2 days.

Hopefully, you found this helpful!
Good luck in your interviewing and job hunting!!!!
If you have any questions feel free to ask them below.