Current:
Role: Software engineer
Experience: ~3 years
Company: Some low level company
Location: Middle of the USA
Leetcode: ~400 questions (Easy 130 | Medium 230 | Hard 40)

Offer Details:
First of all I would like to thank all the Leetcode community for creating this amazing platform and helping me get up to speed with the latest coding practices and amazing . I have recently not been working on the JAVA/Backend and had moved a little to the front end.

After I started practicing the LC and overall fundamentals in late 2019 and then took a long break in December. But, eventually I found the real flow where I needed to be later on. I was fully prepared around March/April and then comes the Hiring freezes everywhere. Then, I took some break because of personal reasons. Break will mess up some things for sure.

Started again back in June/July and prepared crazily for everything. Then finally decided to give an Amazon interview for practice. As I was not planning on going there and did not think that I would clear it as this would be my first big/onsite/any kind of interview in 3 years. Luckily I was able to crack that one and at the same time it helped me get the MS interview. The MS process was not easy or straightforward. There was a lot of gap in between processes while you were waiting and had no idea if it would happen or not. Finally got the chance and took it.

My advice would be to believe in yourself and your hard work. Success is right around the corner and it's just a matter of time. Good luck everyone !

Amazon

First Round was the HackerRank Challenge with two questions and 90 minutes. Both were from LC with minor variations:

1. Most Common words
2. Partition Label

After the round got the result in 2-3 days for a scheduled single video interview with one of the senior engineers.

• Behavioral questions
  • on challenges I faced at work and overall conversation on work/LPs.
• Coding Round
  • That was the open ended question on how would I find any words which starts in simnilar pattern. (I mentioned the naive approach and then move towards optimzed one by implementing the Trie)

After 4-5 days reached out to recruiter and she confirmed the onsite:
Round 1 (1 hour):

• Behavioral questions - LPs
• Algorithm question - Open ended question on how would I create class/functions for searching a file by name/size in linux kinda system. Designed multiple classes and used BFS for searching recursively.

Round 2 (1 hour):

• Hiring manager - Behavioral questions - LPs
• System Design question - Similar to Air traffic controller
• Messed up a little in the design I think, also there were 3+ LP questions on the same LP

Half hour break

Round 3 (1 hour):

• Behavioral questions - LPs
• Coding question - Similar to insert get random O(1)

Round 4 (1 hour):

• Bar Raiser and lots of Behavioral questions
• Coding question - Variation of copy Linked List with random pointers.

Within a couple of days they got a response that they would provide SDE1 instead of SDE2.

Microsoft
NDA signed. So, I cannot disclose exact questions.

First Round was a single video interview with one of the senior technical manager who was building a new team.

• Behavioral questions
  • on the hardest challenges I faced at work and deep technical details about current work.
  • Here the expectation was to know about the infrastructure tools/services about the release and deployment using AWS/cloud services.
  • I was not familiar with it or had not worked on the AWS deployments, shared that my experience is on the building/developing the product and provided as much info as I had about the cloud work.
• Coding Round
  • Question about arrays I had not seen before.

After more than a week I reached out to the recruiter and she provided a response that the team is not interested as they were looking for DevOps engineer But feedback was good so they will consider me for the onsite at some point.

After constant reaching out to the recruiter with multiple conversations, there was no hope for the onsite. But then I got the Amazon offer and asked MS that I will have to make a decision and need an interview ASAP.

They scheduled the interview within 4 days as last minute entry into some hiring event.
Round 1 (45 mins):

• Some basic Behavioral questions
• Algorithm question - Some Graph question from Leetcode

15 min Break

Round 2 (45 mins):

• Some Behavioral questions about the teams and projects I worked with
• Coding question - Similar to LRU but input/output objects were given very differently

15 min Break

Round 3 (45 mins):

• Some Behavioral questions about the teams and projects I worked with
• Coding question - Question about flights. Slightly similar to multiple interval questions.

15 min Break

Round 4 (45 Mins):

• Behavioral questions about how I handle overtime and stress at work.
• Coding question - One of the parentheses questions.

It was almost little more than a week and by now My recruiter had left the company and I reached out on her last day and she pinged the team for updates.
Later next to next day got the response that they would want to make an offer for SDE2.

Going with Microsoft.