Microsoft Interview Experience: Round 2 & 3 | SDE | 60 LPA | Kumar K

Question

After the first round, I got the invite for the second round, and it was with a female interviewer. She told me in the beginning that we were going to solve two questions in one hour. I said okay.

 

The first problem was: we are given a grid of characters and a word, and we need to find if that word exists in the grid. The word can exist horizontally, vertically, or in a mix of both. To solve this problem, my approach was to run a BFS from the locations that contain the first letter of the word, so we can push all these indices into the queue at the start. The thing that we need to take care of here is that we will mark any index in the matrix as visited only after taking it out of the queue, because if we mark it visited while pushing, then we will not be able to use that index for any other path we are exploring. During exploration, when we find the last letter of the given word along the path, we can return true directly. So, it was an easy-medium kind of question.

 

The second problem she asked me was a very standard, famous question: binary search in a rotated array. In this, we just need to apply a few conditions to update l and r.

 

I got the result of this interview almost after two weeks, and they said we were moving forward to the 3rd round, which was also the last round. As this was the final round, I was a bit nervous before the interview. When the round began, the interviewer introduced himself. He was a very senior person at Microsoft and had been working there for 20 years. He asked me a system design question: he asked me to design an ordering service for Microsoft so that companies can buy licenses for services from there. As I am very new to system design, I could not design it in the standard way that the interviewer expected, but I did discuss everything about it. This round also lasted for around one hour.

 

Final Verdict: Not Selected (Because of the system design round for which I was not prepared.)

 

After giving a couple of technical rounds at bigger companies, I can say that most of them ask questions from Graphs and Trees, because in these topics they can discuss better with the candidate.