Microsoft New Grad 2020 (Offer)

After the phone screen with the manager, I was invited for virtual interviews on 14th April! Here are the questions!

Interview 1:

Couple of questions on background, projects.
Coding : Find all the prime numbers from 2 to n
-- Approach 1 ( Use two for loops) - O(N2)
-- Approach 2 (Sieve) - Gave my best answer for time complexity

  • Follow up (I used i*i in for loop which could cause an integer overflow, so handled it accordingly)

Interview 2:
Question on how did you handle a team conflict.
Coding: I want you to build a wordament game which is a n*n grid, and we have to form the words and each correct word would give you an integer prize.
-- Approach 1 ( Use DFS) and search from each cell in the grid
-- Follow up (What if the game ends in 2 mins) How can we get the max. Prize?

Interviewer 3:
Background? Interests? why microsoft?
Coding problem: Given two strings: A and B, find out if they are equal. In the string, there could be a backspace character ‘#’ which means we need not count the character previous to ‘#’ -- meaning if A = “aab#c#” and B = “aa”, then they are equal
Approach 1 (Use stack)
Approach 2 (Iterate through string) - saves O(N) space

Interviewer 4:

How were the interviews? Background? project discussion etc. Talked about his database background
Coding : Merge two sorted arrays, discussion on merge k sorted arrays, and then write merge sort in an iterative way.

Overall, I liked the interviews and asked questions. I like how people are enthusiastic about databases, problem solving and professional communication.

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