Status: New grad, MS CS
Position: SDE1 at Microsoft
Location: Sunnyvale, CA
Date: March 16, 2020
Work experience: 2 years
First phase (on campus / phone screening)
I chose on campus screening, this was in February, before shelter-in-place was ordered. This was the standard tell me about yourself, experiences, and interests interview. After this I was called for onsite.
Second phase (onsite - 4 rounds)
This is virtual onsite due to covid19 shelter-in-place orders. It had 4 rounds, standard technical interviews.
Round 1: This round had 2 questions. First one was very easy. May be it's a warm-up question. The second was not so typical leetcode question, I struggled a bit, took some hints and finally solved it.
Q1: Given an integer, return the difference of product and sum of digits
Q2: Detect whether the given string is in scientific notation or not using state machine flow. Examples of sceintific notation, 1e-3, 123e2
Round 2: This round again had 2 questions. First one was related to topological sort. You can find both these questions on leetcode.
Q1: Given a set of tasks and its dependencies, return the possible ordering of tasks. The tsaks may be cyclic as well.
Q2: Serialize and deserialize a M-ary tree
Couple of follow-ups on the question 2
Round 3: Design circular buffer using array. A read from buffer will free up the slot. A write from buffer will either use empty slot or overwrite the oldest slot.
Round 4: This round was taken by the manager of that team. This round also incuded some behavorial questions.
Given a k-sorted array, return the sorted array. What is the time and space complexity?
Example of a k-sorted array: [4 5 2 1 6 3], expected answer [1 2 3 4 5]
Behavorial questions:
Overall the experience with the interviewers and hiring committe is positive. I took some hints in round 1, question 2 as I was unaware of state-flow-diagram in computer science perspective. I nailed all other rounds. Here are few interview tips for you:
I had two offers in hand, Amazon and Microsoft. I ended up signing Microsoft offer :)