I applied online. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Microsoft (Seattle, WA) in Nov 2019
Interview
I applied online for a data scientist position, I was contacted about two weeks later for a senior software engineer position instead. The interviewer was quite pleasant and helpful, and gently corrected me when I made (minor) mistakes.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
You are given a 2D image with black and white pixels (0 and 1) and a position x,y. Find the connected component (1 pixels) containing x,y.
I was also asked a couple followup questions about the disadvantages of recursion (too much memory overhead for the function calls), and how to implement my algorithm iteratively (answer: just use a stack! ...).
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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