Microsoft Onsite [Reject]

After getting help from tons of interview posts and discussions, I decided to share my interview experience.

I gave an onsite for the hiring event. Prior to this, I was given an OA which had 3 easy to medium level questions.

For Onsite, there were total 4 rounds:

ROUND 1: Second Minimum Node In a Binary Tree. I gave the recursive solution but the interviewer wanted the iterative one which I could only tell verbally in the last few minutes.

ROUND 2: You are given a String, e.g. "ABC-DEF", "XYZ-PQR", you need to print all number combinations it can have. Variation of: Letter Combinations of a Phone Number. I provided the solution and ran a few test cases. However, as the string was large, the output was truncated after printing upto a certain limit. The output was as expected for smaller strings. The interviewer wanted me to print all lines, so I verbally gave ran through the solution of storing it in a list.

ROUND 3: Search in Rotated Sorted Array. Gave the solution, the interviewer was happy.

ROUND 4: There's a robot in the tunnel.

• The tunnel won't have a T junction
• There can be blocker in tunnel, if there is, you should choose to either turn right or turn left
• Robot can only move forward, it can access 3 APIs boolean moveForward() void turnLeft() void turnRight()

Verify if the robot can reach the end of the tunnel. I was given Robot object as an input and can use the above function to make decision. Couldn't find similar problem. I thought of this as a line tracer, gave the solution and the interviewer accepted it.

Result: Recruiter reached out to me after 2 days and told me that I was almost there but the 2nd interviewer's decision was a no hire.

Thanks all.

YOE: 1+ , Location: Seattle