Microsoft SWE Intern 2024 | Off-Campus India

Round 1: Online Assessment

• Duration: 90 mins
• Platform: Codility
• Questions: 3 coding questions. 1 Easy (String parsing), 2 Mediums (Greedy algorithm and Graph traversal).

Round 2: DSA & Problem Solving

• Duration: 45 mins
• Questions:
  1. A variation of Minimum Height Trees (LeetCode Medium).
  2. Find the Diameter of a Binary Tree (LeetCode Easy/Medium).
• How to Answer: Microsoft focuses heavily on trees and linked lists for interns. I made sure to define my base cases clearly in the recursive functions before writing the main logic. Drawing the recursive call stack on a virtual whiteboard really helped explain my logic.

Round 3: CS Fundamentals & DP

• Duration: 45 mins
• Questions: Find all palindromic substrings in a given string. This was followed by a rapid-fire on Operating Systems (Deadlock vs Starvation, Thrashing, Paging).
• How to Answer: Always mention the space-time complexity tradeoff. I provided the DP O(N^2) approach but also verbally explained the Manacher's Algorithm O(N) approach, which impressed the panel.

Round 4: Hiring Manager

• Duration: 30 mins
• Questions: Asked me to write an infinite loop and explain how the OS handles it (Context switching, CPU scheduling). Also asked me to write multi-threading code to utilize my laptop's specific core count.
• Key Takeaways for Freshers: Be ready to open Task Manager and relate academic theory to your actual machine! Practical knowledge of OS and Threads is a massive differentiator for Microsoft interviews.