Microsoft | SDE-2 | Hyderabad | Rejected

Exp : 4.4 years

HI ,

I got a call from Microsoft recruiter about opening for SDE-2 for Hyderabad Location. Below is my Interview experience. I had total 3 rounds of interviews. Out of 3, 2 of the interviews on DS-Algo and 3rd round was on Low level design.

Round 1: So in this round he started with my resume. He asked me about my recent project, we had a good discussion on that. Later he asked me below 2 questions.

1. Find the longest substring with k unique characters in a given string https://leetcode.com/problems/longest-substring-with-at-most-k-distinct-characters/
2. Lowest Common Ancestor of Deepest Leaves https://leetcode.com/problems/lowest-common-ancestor-of-deepest-leaves/

I was able to write code for both two questions and he was happy with my code. and last he asked me one behavioural question.

Round 2: This round also focuosed on DS-Algo. He asked me below two questions.

1. It was based on Scrabble game. Find the higest score of word from the given input string. Where input string is maximum of 9 char long. and he also told that assume that you have dict which tells you whether word is valid or not and also you have a function which will calculate score of word. For this question, he was not looking for optimal solution, so i gave him brute force approach and as already 35-40 mins was over, he moved to next question.
2. Arrange given numbers to form the biggest number. It was pretty stright forward and i was able to write a code for that.

After Round 2, i was not expecting a call for a 3rd round as i was not able to give optimal solution for 1st question in that round. But i got a call for 3rd round.

Round 3: This was Low level Design round. First he asked few questions on my resume. He asked me to Design Logging Module which can be import in any client application.

I was able to give him class structure of logging module with abstract class and abstract method. We had a good discussion almost for 2 hours. Below are few points he asked me to consider:

1. User should able to define Log level (INFO, ERROR, DEBUG)
2. User should able to give location on which he/she wants to write log ( Console, File, Sever)
3. Type of Content (Plain text, HTML)

So while creating object for Log he will give config and If user wants to update this config after some time then he should able to update config.

After Some time i got a call from Recruiter saying that i was not selected for last round as i didn't do well in my Low Level Design round.

Overall all interviewers were very humble and friendly. Whenever i got stuck during inerview they gave hint what if we do this. So it was very good experience.

Happy Coding!!