I want to thank Leetcode community for helping me to crack this interview; now it's my time to give back. I am from a Tier 3 college and I have five years of experience as a Software Engineer at a product based startup with a valuation of more than $3 billion.
When I started, I was scared and had shallow confidence as I was not good at data structure and Algorithms. I started solving easy questions at Leetcode, which boosted up my confidence. I went through all the basic explore card at Leetcode.
Till now I have solved 263 Leetcode questions (Easy 89 Medium 146 Hard 28)
Explore card at Leetcode for different companies is really helpful.
I can't mention any external link here, as the post will be deleted.
Interview
A recruiter contacted me on LinkedIn, and all the rounds happened on the same day.
Round 1: DS ALGO He started with a few questions on my past project and then the following
question1: https://leetcode.com/problems/populating-next-right-pointers-in-each-node-ii/
I solved this iteratively then he asked me to do it recursively. I solved it without any hints.
question2: A question with a variant of finding the contiguous subarray which has the largest sum: I solved it without any hints.
Round 2: LLD The question was to design an online system where a user can see the number of other online users. Follow up: There are multiple data centre and a load balancer. I had to tell how load balancer and other data centre will communicate.
Round 3: HLD He asked me to design Facebook feed from scratch. I had to ask clarifying questions but it went well.
Round 4: Hiring Manager He explained about the team structure and what Microsoft is doing. He asked me about my past projects in detail and 1 behavioural question( Give me an example where you failed and that impacted the company). At last, he asked an easy design question( kind of LLD).
Got an offer the next day.
Compensation : https://leetcode.com/discuss/compensation/864236/microsoft-sde-ii-level-62-hyderabad
Amazon interview experience :https://leetcode.com/discuss/interview-experience/865074/Amazon-or-Toronto-or-SDE-II-or-Reject
Google interview experience : Coming soon