The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Microsoft (Seattle, WA) in Oct 2008
Interview
As a college student, Microsoft first came to my Campus to give me an interview, where they asked me a challenging programming logic question. I passed that interview, and they flew me to Seattle for an on-site interview. Over the course of a day, I had 4 interviews that were much like my on campus interview. At each interview, I was asked a technical question. From what I heard, it seemed that only about one out of every four people who are flown to Seattle will receive an offer.
Interview questions [4]
Question 1
You have a list of red and blue objects. You have to sort them using swapping in order N time.
Given a set of people, one of them is a celebrity. You have a 2D array which describes which people know each other, that is [N, M] is true if N knows M. The celebrity will not know anyone (except them self) and everyone will know the celebrity. Find an order N algorithm to find the celebrity.
You have list of numbers that are sorted but shifted. That is, a list like [5, 6, 1, 2, 3] or [15, 17, 20, 25, 2, 8] is given. Find the most efficient way to search for a number in this type of list.
Started with a recruiter phone call and a 30 minute phone call with the hiring manager to negotiate a remote role since the job was based in Seattle and the manager agreed. Following up with five rounds of virtual on site. Four of them are coding/design. One of them is behavioral mostly leetcode medium level questions which I finished and I was able to do all the follow up and answer the design and time complexity questions correctly after the interview got ghosted for a whole month and got an automatic rejection email.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Leet code medium level questions. DFS, BFS, sliding windows and greedy algorithm. Follow up, asking some design questions and the time complexity of the code.
Phone interview with hiring manager for 45 minutes primarily a tech interview. Focused on questions directly related to tech stack. Come prepared knowing design questions and how those conversations go.
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