[ INFO ]category: Behavioral · Onsite difficulty: hard freq: first seen: 2024-03-16
[HARD][ONSITE]OnsiteSDE IIUnknown
$catproblem.md
Microsoft Interview Experience
Timeline: 2 months in
Position: SE2 (or equivalent)
Microsoft [Recruiter reached out on LinkedIn]
OA [DSA]: 2 coding problems, easy to medium, 1st on DFS, 2nd on Variable size sliding window (Solved both in 15 mins, but there was a platform problem which is why 1st's submission wasn't being accepted, wrote about it to recruiter in email)
Round 1 [DSA]: Discrete Mathematics (Statistics,), Stack + BFS () - Implemented sub optimally 1st, gave optimal approach to 2nd
Round 2 [Design]: Design extensions. Focus was on APIs, interservice communication, security measures and constructs
Round 3 [Design]: Design DB snapshot system with in-memory operations having strict time and space complexity for insert, lookup, update operations
Note: What I realised from Microsoft's design rounds is that they don't ask generic distributed system questions wherein you can throw random components out of published articles or books. They ask questions where scalability is not a challenge but even to implement the functionality in one single machine is difficult.