NO HR round,

Microsoft did not have any HR round. One thing I noticed was that they asked questions mostly from Tree, Trie and Graph in my case. Other candidates also told me that there were questions from OS, DBMS and system design among others but DS-Algo was the main area of concentration according to them based on their feedbacks after appearing for the interview.

The selection process included an online coding test on the Mettl platform. The test consisted of three questions and each question was supposed to be solved within one and a half hours.

language you can use as you wish:

1. Python
2. Java, and
3. C++ was allowed in the tests.

• In question two, we were requested to find the largest distance between two 2D locations whereas in question one we had to queue and dequeue items.
• In the last question, we were asked about how many adjacent swaps needed to make a string palindrome. These medium-level questions have been repeated in various IITs and they have equal difficulty levels over there as well. It is so because this test is aimed at assessing one’s ability of function point-to-point computation skill-based evaluative approach towards candidateship.

The group-fly round was the second round which was arranged a day before the interview. It was a pen and paper-based test. Here, all the students were divided into groups of 5-6 each having one mentor. We had to write full code for the questions with the best time and space complexity expected from us in this round. Two questions were asked in this round, one was based on Trie and another one was based on Binary Tree. In a group fly round discussion with your mentor is mandatory, they want you to first explain your approach rather than writing it directly. Even if you are not able to think the best approach by yourself, explaining it to your mentor helps; he can guide you till the final answer.I did both questions a little early in my group so he asked me few questions on operating systems and how the compilation and execution of code happens.

After that round, shortlisted students will be called for an interview. For me, it happened next day after group fly round itself.

The interview consisted total 3 rounds and all were technical,

• first round [purely coding]
• second round [ interviewer asked me to explain my projects during my internship]
• last round