Academic Status: CS Year 3.5, no name Canadian university
Current Position: SDE Intern @ a major defence company

Before Interview:

• Entire process was about 5-6 weeks.
• Preparation: ~50 Leetcode questions, CTCI, Microsoft Prep session

Technical online screen (1 hour):

• This portion of the interview was done online via Codility. Interviewer was super nice and understanding about remote interviewing
• Typical behavioural interview questions (describe yourself, why CS, why Microsoft)
• My coding question was to create a function to insert into a sorted linked list

Virtual Onsite (2 rounds): ...

My virtual onsite consisted of 2 rounds, although I believe there was a shortlist after the 2nd round to narrow down candidates.

• First round: Construct a BST from a preorder traversal (Follow up: can you beat nlogn time)

  • My interviewer was super chill and happened to be on the team I was interviewing for. Jumped straight into the code and ended up giving me a chance to ask questions for last 20 minutes. Made sure to clarify my inputs and outputs as well as test my solutions.

• Second round: Conduct a BFS of a BST (Follow up: How would you perform this with a max queue size of 100)

  • This interview began with some questions about my experiences and resume. I could sense a bit of a disconnect between me and the interview as he kept asking me to clarify/re-summarize my experience. He actually recommended that I Google/Bing the algorithm rather than solving it (as this was more pratical to real-world situations) and implement the algorithm I found. I took a parellel processing approach to the follow-up question however, the interviewer informed me he was looking an encapuslation approach. I wasn't really sure what he meant but I was honestly too embarassed to clarify.

All in all, I'm really thankful for the experience and getting the chance to interview at my first big N company. Hurt to get the rejection, however I learned a lot, and hopefully more to come!