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List of all microsoft interview questions on glassdoor

A list of microsoft questions from glassdoor.

Shuffle Linked List
Delete duplicate characters
Use 3 types of different data structure to delete a list of objects
Reverse the string
What are you going to learn next?
How to reverse a string
Why Microsoft? Why not ***** company?
Tell me about yourself? Weakness/Strength/etc.
How would you implement a caching proxy server ?
Say you’re a cobbler and I want to buy a pair of shoes… what would you do?
How would you design a children’s alarm clock
Deriving beam bending relations
What is a singleton?
Design an elevator system.
What is your favorite device? Why do you like it? What can you do to improve it?
Tell me about a project you’re worked on.
Describe a cache.
What’s the difference between a flip-flop and a latch?
What are the cache coherency issues with DMA controller, and how can you solve these in your software?
What are some issues with a pipeline?
technical/ computer science related questions. complex NP-Complete algorithms.
Solve ‘Tic-Tac-Toe’
Now we have a board and the game is currently proceeding. Write a function ‘bool isFinished(char a, int x, int y) to decide whether game is finished when put one chess (a == ‘O’ or ‘X’) on (x, y) of the board.
What data structure are you going to use?
Write the whole function down on the paper
If given more space, can you improve your solution?
what is your question before we get started?
Print a binary tree in level order
Why do you want to apply only for software developer post when there are a number of other openings?
Describe a time you hit a roadblock and how you overcame that challenge.
Describe OOP.
Remove all instances of a character from a string. Modify to remove all instances of a sequence of characters from a string.
Reverse a linked list.
Find the max int in an onordered binary tree.
What is the difference between malloc and calloc.
Multi thread algorithms
Design question and behavior question, and questions about my school projects
Probability of a knight making a valid move on NxN matrix in m steps.
Design a flexible mouse trap
What were the toughest decisions you had to make in your role as a Team leader and what consequences did you think they would have ? However once you carried out the decisions what consequences did they actually have
Describe some design principles in a project you’ve participated in.
Design a page for a customer to leave Mint.com
Given three integers as input, write a function that tells whether it is equilateral, isosceles, or right triangle. if it is not a triangle, it should say so as well.
Describe your troubleshooting process.
Can you tell me about the specific areas of measurement for your CM group on a job you ran 5 years ago
Redesign the airport security experience.
Tell me about a product that you feel is well marketed.
Find max sum of sequential integers in an array
Come up with a design for 3 elevator
Implement a double ended stack
Count no. of words in a string
count no. of each character & word in a file
Standard conversational questions about software development best practices.
How would you test the Start button on windows
Explain Linked List witha an example and a code
Not many questions. We discussed the position and challenges.
Count # of A’s in a sentence
Write a function that returns a list of the nodes of a given level in a binary tree
Traverse a weird tree
Why I apply for the position
Design a security check point in the airport.
Design a way to figure out how to test the min CPU of windows 8.
Tell me about a time in which you were responsible for resolving conflicts with multiple stakeholders.
What do you do when a customer insists on a solutions but the the technical team doesn’t want to use that solution?
reverse a string of words. and how do u test your program?
why you choose this position
what projects you have done in the past
tell me a difficult situation, how you solve it?
how do u test a vending machine
How will you estimate the number of ipads sold to sales staff in the pharma industry.
What are some fundamental differences between Java & .NET?
Implement strstr in the language of your choice.
design an algorithm to find every word in a 4*4 box (like words with friends)
how to find if two rectangles intersect
lowest common ancestor in binary tree,
given modules and shud come up with test cases
What are your weaknesses
Don’t remember the specific questions – they were focused around the employee values.
How would you test a calculator
Whats good software?
Why Microsoft?
Given the root of a binary search tree, link all the nodes at the same level, by using an additional Node* level.
Why do you want to work at Microsoft?
What is the largest / most difficult program you have written in C/C++?
Given in-order and pre-order traversals on a binary tree, construct the tree.
Round a float to the nearest integer value within using any other functions
How should we as a for profit software company approach open source licensing models, and what are the potential risks and benefits in doing this?
best strategy to take out the duplicate elements in an array
How can you write a recursive function calculating the exponential of a number?
A,B,C Input, determine if its a triangle.
Diagonally flip a two dimensional array.
Given an int m and a singly linked-list, find the mth to last element of the list. (Hint: ask if it is also circular)
Reverse all the characters in a string before you encounter an ‘x’. abcdxdd – > dcbaxdd
Reveres all the words in a string before you encounter a word which has ‘x’ in it.
Hi, I like Microsoft asdfxab Settle -> Microsoft like I Hi, asdfxab seattle.
Reverse a single linked list
Given a string say “ABCD”. Now create a new string with duplicates of each character in the original string and to it append the reverse of the same string (with duplicates) excluding the last character.

First iteration: AABBCCCCBBAA
Second iteration: AABBBBAA
Third iteration: AAAAA

Correct all syntax errors and identify boundary conditions in this code.
Open-ended design on a word search generator
How many years of experience do you have?
“How would you design an app store for windows mobile app?” She was looking for an answer from both the retail users and the developers perspective. “How easily a developer can upload his apps etc etc”
very simple int to string
implement an hashtable.
what is your favorite sorting algorithm and why?
Multiple thread handling
Binary Tree coding.
Why did I want to be a content editor, (more of an individual contributor) rather than a senior-level content manager?
4 by 4 puzzle with random alphabet and check all words in it
Write a program to print array in spiral order .
Write a program to find anagrams of a string
A question related to computer networks
How do you reverse the letters in a sentence with punctuation (ie. reverse all the letters, but keep the punctuation in place).
Why do you want to go back to work?
what do you think program managers do?
How many times could X car make it around Y freeway loop on one tank of gas?
If I gave you X project with no direction before I left for a week and expected you to have it completed upon my return, how would you go about it?
Compute Factorial of a number
Design a database for employee hierarchy chain …
Write a program to do the SMS text recognition from the number pad. Basically, the three characters per number to possible text recognition (T9). Did I scare you enough?? 😛
What are the steps in mitigating an <____________>. Walk us through each step, why, and how you would handle the situation.
given three integers, determine whether they can form a triangle?

example 1: 3, 4, 5 –> yes
example 1: 3, 4, 15 –> no

find duplicated item from an array, output the duplicated item with their times
Given a string of words, sort the letters of each word in place.

eg “Hello World” –> “eHllo dlorW”

Given a string, how to find the shortest path in a grammar network that forms this string?
Describe one of the challenges that you face in your past project.
Is there any questions you want to ask?
How would you design Battleship board game?
Given a list of words, arrange them in lines with adding extra spaces. Criterias are minimum extra spaces added and maximum length of the smallest line.
How do you motivate different groups with different work cultures to work towards the same corporate goals?
guess the temperature outside a conference room without going outside
check for the durability and funtionality of a keyborad
Don’t remember anything out of the ordinary
what is the most difficult problem you have ever met in your project?
Asked about the weaknesses
Have you delt with a difficult customer – what what the situation and how did you deal with it?
check for palindrome
Why do you want to work at MS
What changes would you make to the group
What is a product that was marketed well?
Design a refrigerator that uses modern technology with no consideration for cost.
Design an iPad recipe app geared towards soccer moms.
There’s something next to your bed, the size of a toaster. What does it do?
1) How do you test a paper cup? Then I was presented with a networked client software with an error dialog with user logged in as a standard users without administrator privileges and I was asked it was a bug.

2) How do you test a parking meter? Then I was asked a coding question on how to write a nested loop function to manipulate two arrays set of numbers

how many zeros are there in 100!
give all the permutations of an array
Talk about a black box….something like that….
some jquery qestions
Tell us about your background.
Describe the projects you have accomplished.
What data structure would you use to solve this problem?Write the code. The problem is similar to reverse the word or sentence but I can not remember clearly what exactly it is.
You have 9 tennis balls and a scale. In 3 or less moves tell me which tennis ball is heavier than the other 8.
Given a ballpoint pen, how would you test its functionality?
Reserve link listed pair-wise
How to test a clock
Given the definition of a Fibonacci sequence, write a function to give the n-th term of the sequence.
Code a solution to rotate bitmap by 90 degrees given a structure definition representing the bitmap and a function prototype for the function to do the rotation.
How would you test a map?
How would you test the find function on notepad?
WAP to check if strings are anagrams or not.
reverse string
Write me a program to perform matrix multiplication of two square matrices
Design and code for me an elevator control unit
How to shuffle a deck of card? (collage interview)
Design a Queue structure by using linked list and code it (on- site 1st interview)
Reserve a string in place? Then, reverse the order of words in a sentence? (2nd)
In order traversal of binary tree? What if we have a limit on the depth of the recursive calls, how can you let user know that tree is so deep that traversal failed? (3rd)
Given a string “1800RENTCAR” can have spaces in any where, output the “1 800 7368-227” Can’t use any additional memory for mapping chars to intergers. You need a math formula to convert them. The output must be exactly the same as the example. (4th)

Given HTML file encode it as . Improve complexity from O(n) to O(logn) to constant time (5th interview)

Technical questions regarding IP and trademark.
Tell me about the hardest technical problem you’ve faced and how you solved it.
How many lines of code have you written? How many lines of code did you write for this hardest program?
How will you tell whether a piece of code is good code?
How will you test a 4-function calculator?
How will you “break” a ball-point pen without snapping it in half (pen should stop doing what it’s supposed to)?
Behavior question
– Pick the one of the hardest of your project during your PhD, and tell me what you’ve learned.
– Point out the one of my industrial experience in my resume, and explain what technology you used in this project.

Coding question
– There are two sorted linked list. Merge two linked list. He gave me C++ prototype.
– Check intersection of two circles.
check (int x1, int y1, int r1, int x2, int y2, int r2)

How would you find repeated patterns in a string
how do you like this university?
whats your fav subject and why?
what comments your friends have for you?
Describe the process to design a shoe
Check if tic-tac-toe has a winner
Delete n-th element from linked list. Note, you don’t have a pointer to the Head of the list.
what is your understanding of the role?
Write a program in java that determines whether a string is a palindrome.
Write a method (in a language that you are comfortable with) that determines whether one given string is a substring of another given string.
Given an array of integers in random order from 1 to 100, but one number was missing, name 3 ways you can find out which number was missing.
Write a program that acts as an application scheduler that runs executables at given times.
What do you bring to the table that is unique?
What makes you qualified for this position?
I can’t reveal the questions since I was asked not to do it
Tell me about the one feature of your email provider you would change and why?
How would you write code to sort students test grades ranging from 0 – 100, so that the students in the class could be ranked according to score?
questions about trees
Discuss 5 critical points for the usage and functionality of a ceiling fan.
merge 2 sorted linked lists .
Why do you want to work at Microsoft?
Design an exchange solution based on this scenario….
write a boolean method to find out if a number is a power of 2
Write code to print all permutations of an array of unique integers.
How is memcpy optimised internally?
Write the code of String class
How will you explain your client the problem (given scenario) in simple words or convince him
A variety of design, strategy, and technical questions. Most questions were design-related – anything from software design to user/feature design to backend server design.
Pancakes, size varies, and are put in a stack with random order. You have one operation called Flip(int[] pancakes, int k) to flip all pancakes from the top one to kth pancake, write a sort(int[] pancakes]) method
A rotated sorted array (e.g. 34512), find the rotation count (in this case, 3 means rotated by 3).
Group of people, you can call Know(i,j) to ask if ith person knows jth, the return value is true (i knows j) or false (i does not know j). Find the person that everybody else knows him but he knows nobody.
What are your strengths?
In the first interview, the coding problem was to generate a well-known data set. I first considered how to generate the nth iteration of the dataset, but she quickly steered me to solving iterations 1-n (which is much easier).
How would you do an impartial performance assessment of a subordinate? (in the HR round)
If you increase the width of a PCB trace, does it decrease or increase the trace impedance?
What factors control the impedance of a trace?
What happens to a signal integrity as you increase length and when there is return current?
Derive the transfer function of a specific Op Amp configuration
Find the collector current based on this configuration and voltages.
Tell me what your previous supervisor from two jobs ago (e.g. not your most recent supervisor) would describe as your three greatest weaknesses and how would your most recent supervisor respond to that and describe your three greatest strengths.
which ms product do you use a lot (hotmail). how would you test it? what would you change about it?
Consider a game of nxn tic tac toe. Given a move and the player who made the move, return whether it was a winning move or not. There is an O(1) answer.
Write the functions for a circular queue.
How would you design analog filters?
How would you sort a random sequence of negative and non-negative numbers
Given inorder and preorder traversals of a tree, reconstruct the tree.
Given a n-by-m sparse matrix, find the number of disjoint paths (i.e. bits in the matrix set to one that are linked).
Given the 3×3 Android lock screen, get all the possible combinations to unlock it.
Find the unique integers in an integer array.
Convert the binary search search to circular doubly linked list
A lot of questions are pulled directly from “Programming Interviews Exposed”, so read that book. One example is the telephone keypad to words question mentioned by others.
If you get at your home, and the key is not longer opening the entrance door, what do you do?
You have 16 race horses and a racetrack which only fits 4 horses at one time. Find the top 4 horses in the fewest number of races.
If you were informed by a PM that you were responsible for building out a an entirely new service, how would you build it out?
Are you interested in the job?
Design app to let students say what classes they’ve attended that week
Retirement home gets 100 tablets. What do you do with them?
Design “find a person” website to find Ellis Island immigrants
What does a college dorm look like in 10 years?
What big thing do you want to be involved in at Microsoft?
Lunch interview discussed a bit about my work. Rest of the interview, as mentioned above under interview process.
define utilization of flights if you were CEO of Southwest.
1) “yzca” <= inputStr = "abca", compareStr = "ab", replaceStr = "yz" string funcReplaceStr(string inputStr, string compareStr, string replaceStr) 2) Design a normalized datastore and t-sql for getting this problem: Get me the top 10 customers who have purchased the most products from my site.
Why do you want to work for Microsoft?
What do you think is the most important thing about the ADM position?
What things would you change about the team?
Tell me about a time you had to solve a problem under pressure
How do you reverse a singly linked list?
Design a parking structure
Talk about experience
What was the most challenging thing in any of your projects?
How would you deal with an agry customer?
int Solve(string str);

Given the signature above, implement the simplest method that returns the results of the following arguments:

1. “3+5” (8)
2. “10+2-8” (4)
3. “5+10*3” (35)
4. “3+5–6″ (14)

Design an elevator control system.
Given a tree find if any path that sums up to a given value
the starting node may not be the root node always
What would you do in a certain situation? Describe a time you had to deal with a situation, and explain how you dealt with it?
Tell me about yourself?
Why Microsoft?
Have you ever had to deal with a difficult customer?
Teach me how to swing a golf club right now over the phone.
Would you be interested in working as a contractor first?
Write a method to rotate an array at n without using O(1) space.
How would you test this method
Given an array of size n with values within a known range, write a method to find duplicates in O(1)
Situation where you have taken active responsibility where it stretched your skills?
What is stack?
how many lines of code did you write on last year?
design an alarm clock near a busy airport
how would you deal with an angry customer?
Copy a singly linked list with the following twist: each node in the linked list has, in addition to a pointer to the next node in the list, a pointer to null or some other node in the linked list.
Describe how would you measure success
OOP concepts. Implement atoi and write test cases. How would you test for integer overflow even before performing atoi, in the atoi function that I had written. Class diagram for an e-commerce website.
Explain how you would test something. Explain how would you design a new college building in your campus to hold classes. How would you get the total number of pet dogs in the Bellevue area.
Explain some differences between 5 or 6 technologies. I was told that its okay if I would skip certain differences and that I needed to explain only a couple of them. Explain how would you test something.
Largest substring in an array of -ve and +ve integers problem. Was given an abstract function and was asked to write test cases for it. Design a website to save user’s passwords for various e-mail and social networking accounts.
Low Power Design. VLIW .Verilog .
Design a test strategy for DLNA based wireless streaming. Tell how to test it.
Find the n the element of a singly linked list without traversing the linked list more than once. Test the program.
Write an optimized program to find the characters within a string and return number of times it will get repeated along with the character. Test the program
175 players in a 1 to 1 match. Those who fail the match quits. Find out a strategy to design the games in a way where minimum number of games will be played to select the winner.
How to explain to a non techy about the paging process of an operating system. Tell the non techy guy about the fragmentation procedure and fragmentation.
The questions were (intentionally) vague. Most were centered around scenarios where you had to solve a customer problem, but had to probe for information. Example: A customer comes to you and says “People are complaining that they are waiting too long for their orders to be completed, fix it.”
What are you passionate about? Why do you want to work here?
Was asked to write a SQL Query.
Design a watch
String reversal
“Hello word” to “world hello”
Implement a Linked List in (Java, C#, C++)
How to implement a circular queue?
– Given an array of integers (of any value, from MIN_INT to MAX_INT), how would you find the consecutive integers with the largest sum, and return their sum?
– Given a string, how would you determine if that string contains a palindrome?
– How would you search a string for a substring, in C? This guy also asked me some questions about hardware and security, such as “describe how a buffer overflow attack works”.
– How would you count the NUMBER of palindromes in a string?
Design a room for a blind person
How would you develop a strategy to market this product?
Write code to tell if two rectangles are intersecting.
What are some possible causes of deadlocks?
List all times (from 0:00 to 11:59) for which the angle between the hour and the minute hand form right angles.
Reverse the individual words in a string (words are delimited by spaces). Example – “Hello world” becomes “olleH dlrow”.
What is the angle between minute hand and hour hand for a clock?
Design an expedia for airport.
Optimize the following C code to decrease the overall O value
Explain the concepts of an RDBMS to a 5 year old
Describe a technical problem from your experiences and describe how you went about solving it.
why do you wan to work for Microsoft
Why do you want to be a SDE
Reverse a string in a matrix in place. you are given the direction and length of the string.
Test an alarm clock that automatically syncs the correct time from a tower owned by the government.
explain the OSI model in networking.
What are the issues with cloud computing?
Write the pseudocode to reverse a string
Write the pseudocode to return the max of two numbers in an array
Relatively simple questions based on arrays and trees.
Tell me about a problem you had in the past with your work and what you did to overcome it.
Implement the fibonacci sequence
Find an element in the array in O(log n). Array is circular, shifted by k units, and sorted (before shift).
find pair of numbers out of sorted array whose sum equal to given number
given value is 9876. print nine thousand eight hunder seventy six
Given a string how would you eliminate the duplicates
Write a full code for sorting.
Describe your current projects?
Given a circular singly linked list of integers, write a function to remove all the duplicate integers and sort it so that when the contents of the circular list get printed, all even numbers get printed first.
Design a mouse for travelling business people.
Why developer
Why Microsoft?
Given hypothetical situation between two employees and asked to resolve a conflict.
why do you want to work at MS?
what technical difficulty you have faced in your past projectS? how did you overcome it?
Talk about the mobile comm playing field.
Broad design questions: If you had to design a phone app for an amusement park, what would it be, what would it do, and how would it do it?
How would you test a calculator?
How does 802.11 work?
What is the difference between LED and LCD displays
How many lines of code I wrote for the project I worked on?
Design a system that will allow users to electronically purchase tickets to a concert / sports event on-site at the venue.
Design a mobile application that will allow users to order pizza.
flip flop set up requirements and corner cases
Implement a function similar to atoi.
How would you price our product?
You are at the southwest corner of a city. The city streets are laid out in a simple grid fashion, with 8 streets running north-south and 8 running east-west. If you can only travel northward and eastward, how many different routes can you take to arrive at the northeast corner of the city?
Shift a String 10 elements forward, and have the elements that fall off at the end of the String move to the front of the String. Don’t use a second String.
Find duplicate numbers in an array
How would you send a secret message with a box if you have to pad locks?
I was asked to rank our competitors in certain categories (relevant to the role) and then asked to rank Microsoft in the same categories.
If you were a manager, one of your team member commited an error. What’ll you do if he or she committed the same error again?
Implement Fibonacci in log_n time
factorial of N numbers.
what is your favorite software and why? what improvement can you do?
How do you design the elevator for an apartment
lines of code written
How to write all words combinations that a phone number can have.
A function that checks if a post-fix representation of a tree is correct when compared with an in-fix representation.
Implement quick-sort.
Calculator question
Name a product (doesn’t have to be Microsoft’s product) that you use frequently.
If you had to add a feature to that product (asked in Question # 1), what would it be?
If I give you a can of coke / pepsi (unopened), how would you test it?
Given three lists, find all the common elements.
Writing code on the white board
Tell me something about neural networks ??
Write program to check winner in a 2D 3×3 tic tac toe.
For a sorted array, how can you search a element?
Write get and put functions for a circular buffer.
(Given 4 financial statements) Microsoft is about to roll out a new Star Wars game on Xbox to promote usage of the Xbox Kinect. How would you price the product and evaluate the project?
Would you be willing to accept a much lesser pay rate than your last contract?
Give me the greatest invention you think that was ever made and tell me why it’s so great. It could be something as simple as a pencil.
Find a convergence point if any in given two linked lists.
Given a binary tree, find its shallowest height.
what type of company culture are you looking for?
case studies – how would you design a user study for situation A, B etc
Why Microsoft?
Describe the difference between a process and a thread.
How many physical files are required to create a database within SQL Server.
implement atoi and itoa in C
polynomial addition/subtraction
given binary tree inorder & preorder traversal, return postorder traversal
your data centers in japan have been hit by the recent earthquake.As chief infrastructure engineer,what steps would you take to minimize loss of data?
Design a device that will keep track of a car’s use.
design questions, resume questions
Write a service that agrigates data from a web service, xml, and sql
past experience
Nothing unexpected or difficult
What did you do at XX work?
What is your best computer science-related skill? How many lines of code did you wrote in the previous year?
What is your favorite Microsoft product?
How would you make it even better?
What is the stack?
What is the critical section?
Do you know other kinds of synchronization control mechanisms in Windows environment?
How to traversal a tree using breadth first method.
Implement a dictionary.
Test if Matrix A contains Matrix B.
No technical questions
How would you design a CD player. Specifically, what UI choices would you make? And then how would you test it?
What are your strengths?
Technical question
What would you tell to your subordinates on the first day of the job.
End to end design of a new core platform product that integrates with some of the existing products
How would you go about improving the strategy and features for a product?
How to implement the minimum spanning tree using double-side lists?
What will you do if there is a conflict between you and your manager, but you are sure that you are right?
Find the last but n elements
What are some strategies to push quality gates upstream in the software development lifecycle?
what’s your role in the project
Suppose that you are working in a very political environment, where people keep hidden agendas, they have no formal reasons to help you and your project depend on them. What do you do to move forward a project that you are responsible for considering that you have no authority over the people you depend upon?
How to design a program for spell check used in Microsoft word?
Why Microsoft?
There was a hard puzzle given to solve.
If you found your boss making a stupid decision on the data structure you are going to use in your code, what will you do? 1. Tell him that is wrong, you are going to use a better data structure. 2. Say yes, but in the end, code with the data structure you think is better. 3. Say yes and do the same, using the less effective data structure in your code.
Explain in deep-details how the project was structured and managed
What do you desire to get out of this position?
How would you design a microwave for the blind?
How would you design a downtown campus for Microsoft?
What personal contribution on your prior job are you most proud of? Why?
What was a difficult personal situation you faced in the past, and how did you handle it?
How many lines of code have you written in your previous job?
Describe your previous work experience
One of the questions was around designing a system where the data would not fit memory of one system and one had to build a very performant lookup on the data
Draw a data model for an inventory system.
how would you test the font button in microsoft word.
Presentation on the future of advertising – 30min to present, 20 min questions.
What is flow?
Why Microsoft?
What is your career goal? short-term and long-term plan?
Enumerate the stages of change leadership
Tell me about a time when you had a heavy workload. How did you handle it?
Have you worked with someone you didn’t like? If so, how did you handle it?
If Microsoft were to select a new location for another office, how would you plan that?
Think of a friend, co-worker, and colleague. How would they describe you?
Insert a node into a doubly linked list
How would you design Facebook from scratch if you wre Mark Zuckerberg?
Question on hash logic.
Why do you want to work for this position for this specific group?
Tell me about your research.
What do you think a project manager does?
Find a way to cut a cake in 8 parts with minimum number of cuts
Write program for generating fibonacci series using 2 variables
write program to check for palindrome
Suggest ways to correct an incorrectly taken digital photograph (with bad lighting, over or under exposure, etc) using a one-click intelligent program.
Find the smallest number in a tree
Transfer number to ACS II,
How do you make sure that two results from a database query request are identical?
Implement a stack using two queues.
How many Java Developers are there in this IT park?
How would you get Java developers to use Microsoft technologies?
What precautions will u take to transfer money from one state to another
Do you have a college degree?
What does flow mean to you?
If you were an animal what would you be?
The interview asked to guess whether I’ve falled into the trap set by him.
lift design for a ten-storied building where no staircase is used by the residents
How do you write test cases for a software application that prints out triangles? What all do you consider when writing your tests?
How would you test a calculator?
Describe the case you can prove that you are a self motivator
first round -> programming for tic-tac-toe puzzle and sudoku puzzle, design pattern related questions and SQL queries.
second round -> asked to design an app which support image uploading, viewing.
Why do you want to come back to Microsoft?
backtrack problem, the max or min sum of a matrix.
tree problem. reverse a tree (left to right)
How would you support the Triad model (Dev, test, PM)?
What’s your understanding of software test?
Implement malloc() and free() to solve heap fragmentation problem, while malloc() should be very fast and free() could be slower.
Design a media player which can load from CD or online, and can shuffle the list, and sequentially / randomly play the songs.
Standard string manipulation question in C. Pencil and paper.
Explain this and that project on your resume. More details about teamwork, bugs fixed, etc.
Situational question: you are a PM and you run into a certain issue. What do you do? What if the problem is bigger or smaller in scope than you originally anticipated? What if your team members disagree, with you or each other?
how do you sort a linked list
how do you find the loop in a linked list
What is the structured class program in ASP.NET
Describe your background.
Use one word to describe yourself, then explain why chose that word.
Design and write pseudo code for TCP using UDP
How do you know if three points make a triangle?
Write a function that takes another function as an argument and then defines a third function which calls the first and second function recursively.
What do you consider to be your biggest weakness on the job?
Consider two arrays of integers, v1 and v2, with allocate memory of (n+m)*sizeof(int) and m*sizeof(int), respectively;
In array v1, you have the first n positions filled with integers, sorted in ascendent order.
In array v2, you have all m positions filled with integers, also sorted in ascendent order.
Write/implement a function that return a vector of size (n+m)*sizeof(int) that have all the elements of v1 and v2, sorted in an ascendent order
Tell me about a time you had to ….
given a sigle linked list. How to finde the last 5th node
implement the queque
given a matrix with entries 0 or 1. find a submatrix with all entries 1
describe the c++ property
Why do you want to work here?
multiplication value of 2 linked lists
What is your background in xyz field?
How would you lead someone in application of GAAP?
design divide by 6 clock
What do you think about this web site’s usability?
Describe how a cartography service such as Bing maps is working when entered an address?
How would you start working with your team the moment you got the job?
You’re developing a very basic calculator. How would you test it? What if it was aimed at children?
You work in the MSFT library and Bill Gates calls saying he wants to pick up a book. You check the catalog and confirm it’s in stock. You tell Lord Gates that you will have the book ready for His Highness in 10 minutes. You go to where the book is on the shelf and find it’s not there. What do you do?
Where do you see yourself in 5 years in this job.
Enqueue and Dequeue
How to find the different part of two array of integers.
design an elevator
Write a program to find palindromes
In an array, there is exactly one element which repeats odd number of times and rest all other elements repeat even number of the times. Find the element optimally
Do you think it would be worthwhile to focus on winning a new target market of baby boomers? If so, how would you develop a hypothesis, subsequent analysis (using your selected data sets) and win agreement within mutiple vertical groups within the company?
Set the pointer of every node in a binary tree to its right sibling.
Situational – describe a situation when you were very angry
Describe a product in the market right now, what do u like about it and how would u make it better.
In a BST write a program to find 2 nodes x and y such that X+y=k
how would you design a web server’s architecture
FInding the common ancestor of 2 nodes in BST
There were no puzzle or game questions. No specific technical questions, but did ask for examples of my technical ability. Most questions asked about my experience and all were behavioral. As this was customer focused, many questions on examples with difficult customers and most stressful situation. Expect the standard “Why Microsoft?”, as for any interview.
Graph Coloring problem: given a connected graph, color each node in the graph such that no two adjacent nodes have the same color.
how would you troubleshoot a router if ICMP is turned off.
Using my linksys router – VOIP call shuts down, all of a sudden.
(Presuming all other ports are working).
How accurate are you with sales forecast?
How many street lights did you pass on your way here to the interview?
Reverse a string.
Reverse the words in a sentence.
How many jobs do you typically manage at one time?
What types of roles do you currently fill?
What do you bring to the table that others may not?
Describe a time when you failed.
identify if a linked list is cyclic
Design a grocery shopping assistant.
How would you find a tank in a grayscale satellite image?
How would you find user data consisting of 600 million entries spread across 600 machines?
2 candles each burning 60 mins + 1 matchstick provided.
Calculate time of 90 mins using this
Number Series : 1 6 12 13 19 _
what was the toughest challenge you faced so far while developing software?
how did you deal with that?
Binary tree Program, Test Case for calculator
Write a program to find out the median of two sorted array.
String matching
Given a series of numbers, replace each number with its nearest possible nuumber
How do you find a interviewee’s phone number?
Question on linked lists
Implement itoa() in c.
Describe your previous job experience
What is the cloud?
Change a given string into small letters
Assume that you are given the head and tail pointers of a doubly linked list where each node can also have a single child pointer to another similar doubly linked list. There are no cycles in this structure outside of the traditional double links. Write a procedure in C++ that flattens this structure into a single list.
Teach me something that you know a lot about.
How do you think your other interviews today have gone?
Write a procedure in C that reverses the letters of a null-terminated string. Then write another procedure in C that reverses the words of a null-terminated sentence.
How did you convince your team to follow your directions?
What did you do when the team disagreed with you?
solve grab scrabble
What makes you so special?
How would you define Category Strategy…over and over.
What if the numbers are not integers ? What if the numbers are negative numbers ?
Design a coffee machine for a luxury car.
what’s your most difficult decision?
find two elements from an array summing up to a certain value
Gave me design question about designing a gambling website where all the participants know that the other guy is not playing foul.
Given a BST find the second largest element?
Technical design question on high availability websites – a real problem they were trying to solve (or so I was told)
If you had to choose between helping your top two clients, what process would you use to decide which one you should help.
There are 4 people who want to cross a bridge. They each take 1, 2, 5 and 8 minutes. Only 2 people can cross at a time and they take as long as the slowest person. What is the fastest time you can get everyone across?

Then I was asked to write the mathematical equation to determine the trade-off point between each of the 2 approaches to solving this.

Interviewer asked about my experiences and described the position.
Name a situation where you had to convince a employee to see things your way?
Have you ever made a mistake professionally and how have you overcome it?
How would you design an automated test system for the clock application on a mobile smartphone?
How would you implement a ‘bag’ data structure with push() and pop() operations that scales well on a massively parallel system. (Imagine you are implementing malloc on a multiprocessor OS)
find if string1 exists in string2, give test conditions
What is your favorite technology product and how would you improve it?
how do you test a remote control?
What is BCP in SQL Server?
What all locks we have in SQL server and explain each one of them with an example.
What is the difference between BLOCKING and DEADLOCK?
How do you describe yourself
How do you test a pen?
What is the difference between public, private and protected classes?
Describe a binary search tree
What is a garbage collector and how does it function?
design a secure and usable login system
implement factorial method
Reverse every word in a string
Design a calculator
Write a function that calculates square root of a given number.
How do you shuffle a deck of cards?
Write a function that checks if a number’s divisors sum up to that number, i.e. whether it’s a perfect number or not.
Calculate the angle between the minute hand and the hour hand of a clock.
Reverse a linked list.
Code up area under a curve
Basic C programs, OS knowledge.
On Site- describe how you would implement a system where you have multiple monitors and a single keyboard and mouse to use across all monitors.
On Site- describe how you would program and elevator system
Phone- Design new features for Facebook.
How do you keep yourself updated in this field?
Give an example that you were part of influencing a decision.
No fancy questions, most of them are already on this site, e.g. reverse a linked list, reverse words.
Why do you want this job?
Why should we hire you for this job?
how will test a coffee vending machine ?
What constitutes a good code
How would you test an elevator built in a hospital
Reverse a string
Describ, in detail, the differences between the Java VM/Runtime and the .NET runtime.
Calculate the angle of the clock.
if you were in a meeting by yourself with a client that took a month to book and you get an emergency phone call from another client asking for help on the spot, what would you do.
what is your biggest failure
Test the Find – Replace Dialog
Find a query pattern in a string
Test a vending machine
If I were to give you $5 billion to run media online for Hotmail, how and where would you spend it and why? In this scenario, you are trying to reach 5 billion acquisitions (meaning a CPA of $1).
I want to justify changing the format of a particular display ad on MSN Messenger. Do you think this change of creative is a good idea? Why or why not? How would you go about measuring the success, or lackthereof, of this change?
Write code that would shuffle a deck of cards. Explain why your solution is optimal and how you would test it.
how would you test an elevator
tell me about a marketing campaign that you like.
why Microsoft? How would you introduce/market a product to compete against the product you mentioned (in question above)?
Truly we just had conversations there were no difficult or even typical interview questions.
write a Fibonacci series algorithm?

write iterative method and in recursive method?

calculate the complexities of designed algorithms?
How do you test a calculator?
How do you write and test a tictac toe problem?
Given a string, I was asked to return all of the unique characters in the order of the original string.
Write a function that takes a String as a parameter. Count the number of A’s in the String before you reach a C.
Write a non-recursive traversal of a Binary Search Tree using constant space and O(n) run time.
Find a duplicate integer in a list of length K with integers 1…K-1 and one duplicate. Do so in O(n) time with constant space.
how to find all the palindromes inside a string?
why the lids of the gutter are circular?
There were no difficult questions
How would you test a pen?
How many people can you stuff in a school bus
Brain Teaser #1 –

You are on a game show. Pretend I am the game show host. Now, pretend that I am showing you 3 curtains and I am also telling you that behind 2 curtains are goats and behind the remaining curtain is a car. He then draws 3 boxes on the board and labels then 1, 2, and 3. Now he tells me to pick a curtain. I pick curtain number 3. Now he says, “Okay. I’m going to tell you now that curtain #1 contains a goat (and he tells me this as he crosses off curatin #1). I’ll give me a chance to change your answer to curtain #2 or stick with curtain #3.

What do you do and why?

Brain Teaser #2 –

Implement an algorithm in pseudo-code that outputs the angle between the hour hand and minute hand of an ordinary clock at any moment in time. (You are not allowed to hardcode anything. The algorithm must use formulas that you come up with yourself to translate the hours to degrees and the same for the minutes). For example, if the minute hand is exactly at 12, you cannot hardcode 12 = 0 degrees.

Pretend you are in a factory that produces cones. There is a conveyor belt in a factory that moves these cones from 1 machine to another. The operations manager of this factory tells you that they could increase the efficiency of their factory if the cones were delivered facing the exact same way from 1 machine to the other. Basically, the cones today are getting delivered in what ever angle they happened to fall into once the first machine completed its task (some are standing up, others facing left, others facing right, etc…)

Develop a process that will take these cones and arrange them all to face LEFT before they are inputted into the 2nd machine.

array of +ve nums, find pairs that add up to a given value
test a function that inputs 3 sides of a triangle
Previous work experience towards the job.
Describe the differences between a hash table and binary search tree.
Given a node in a BST, design an algorithm to find the next smallest node in the tree.
There is a business unit within a large software company (Microsoft) that has X revenue, their expenses are increasing, their competitors are creating lower cost products, and their suppliers are putting pressure on costs from the supply side (there were a few other circumstances I don’t remember). What would you do? What other information would you need? What questions would you ask?
How else could you market ping pong balls if ping pong itself became obsolete? (List many, then pick one and go into detail)
What was the hardest qusetion you were asked in the interview loop today?
Think of any process that you are familiar with (doesn’t have to be software related) and explain it to me as if I were a 7 year old child.
What is a product you think is marketed well? How would you improve the marketing for it?
Why do you want to be a Software Engineer?
Given an array of sorted integers where duplicates are allowed, find the index of the first number I give you?
What is the runtime?
Can you find a better solution?
What was your worst grade at your school, and why is that?
Looking at your past with entrepreneurial and free spirited actions. I don’t think you will be happy even if I give you this job, will you be? [this is a specific question for entrepreneurs turning to jobs, not a general question]
why do you come to us?
how long you want to work at us?
Phone Interview-
1. Behavioral questions based on resume.
2. Test a software that would create triangle based on length entered.
3. Palindrome using recursion.
4. Test alarm clock
1. Implement stack using queue
2. Merge two arrays and sort them in order as specified at runtime. The two arrays may share common entries between them, but the resultant array must not have duplicates.
Write the algorithm to move bytes of data from one piece of memory (fragmented memory) to another
Explain the internet to your non-technical grandma.
How would you design an alarm clock for a student that guarantees that they are never late for class. What features would you have and why
Find if given tree is binary or not.
What is the difference between Java and C
Design a method that removes every other node from a linked list.
Given a set of numbers -50 to 50, find all pairs that add up to a certain sum that is passed in.

What’s the O notation for what you just wrote?

Can you make it faster? Can you find an O(n) solution?

Implement the O(n) solution

1st round:
write integertoasciiconversion(char *s , int n) , here the discussion on who would allocate memory pointed by s , if its the user what wuld be the adv ?
2nd round: test wireless mouse, given two string remove the occurances of characters in one string from another
3rd round: lunch interview, discussion of my resume, intersted projects, 2 more coding questions , sub sum of numbers in an array
4 round: given 2 rect’s find the intersection here the discussion is about the choosing of structures, design
5th round: HR with manager, justify why SDET(this where i scrwed and got declined) , one puzzle about LED
It was a graph theory question to find distance between two cities.
How do you create secure voice communication over IP cloud?
If I am your supervisor and am really bad to you, how do you deal with it? No, even after you have a heart to heart conversation I am even worse. What do you do?
How to test a Canoe
Given N, find the Nth element from last in a linked list
how will you react when faced with an angry client
BST BFT variant…
Find nearest ATM machine given gps location and a list of ATMs
What data structure would you use to store a dictionary supporting search like “ab?p”
Reverse a binary tree
Stretch a linked list with bottom node
Find missing number in a array of size 100 for number range from 0 to 100 (no repeat)
Find the character with longest repitition in the string e.g. aaacccddddeefffffffg the result should be ‘f’.
Different between User Mode and Kernel Mode
Different Between UDP and TCP
Here is a string with duplicate characters in java. Remove the duplicate characters. Return value is a string
finding a missing number in a continuous number sequence.
Write a function that determines whether a given number is a prime. Discuss perf improvements.
Write a function that takes a linked list and removes every other element in it. Discuss test cases.
Describe a bug which are proud of. Why are you proud of this bug?
Design an elevator that is going to be used in a hospital
describe a time when you had to create and employ a process which didn’t exist in order to solve a problem.
string manipulate in text file.
test questions
merge two sorted arrays or lists
level by level print BST
What woudl you do if you were a company about to launch a new electronic product and on the eve of the launch, you were told that there was an Apple product being releasted? You have no information on it except that it may be a competitor to yours?
What skills do you bring that will allow you to hit the ground running?
What is your communication style
How would you test a calculator that is going to be used by elementary school aged children?
Implement enqueue and dequeue using stacks.
Given an unsorted array of integers, sort them in such a way that all negatives come first, followed by zeroes, followed by all positives.

could become
-6,-10,0,8,4,11 (does not have to be sorted into increasing order)

What is the run time of this? Can we reduce the run time, if so, how (implement the new way)? Doing black box testing, how can we determine the run time? How can we determine if we have a memory leak?

Given a string (understood to be a sentence), reverse the order of the words.

“Hello world” becomes “world Hello”

How would you implement a stack? How would you account for multiple incoming requests to add or subtract data. How would you test this.
What teaching experience you have in terms of new technology?
Tell me about yourself?
What does a PM do?
What was the most challenging project you have ever worked on?
What is the maximum number of lines you have coded for a project?
What are the qualities of a good software?
How would you use motion control technology in PowerPoint?
Your team has come up with some really out-of-the-box ideas. Your job is to research and find out if the idea is worth pursuing empirically speaking.
How do you manage project changes?
How do you influence team/people who you don’t have authority?
Convert a Hex value into IP address.
Given a set of structure/object which has 2 value. Sort the set with respect to 1’st number and then with 2nd number
Wrote a function on white board and asked me to test the function
Name some support methodologies you know.
Explain to us what is heterosketasticity and specifically how to solve it.
The difficult part was the time duration of the interview. Since it was supposed to last about 20 minutes, I shouldn’t have tried to explain my answers like in a behavioral interview. I should have gotten to the point by giving brief answers.
check if a string palindrome or not
Name one software/computer product that you currently use and how you would improve it.
Design an app for an iPad that will order me a Papa John’s pizza.
1) What is a product that you think is perfect?
2) How could you improve it?
3) Ok, show me specifically what that would mean: design the user interface.
Implement a graph class, find the minimum spanning tree?
Implement a Sudoku solver.
Implement an efficient string searching algorithm.
Why microsoft?
What makes you passionate about technology?
Difference between virtual memory and physical memory
How will you describe OOP to kids?
What’s a technology you find really awesome, really cool, and you think it’s perfect?
Implement an user interface that will make it better
What is the difference between a process and a thread?
Print the order of numbers in reverse in an array using pointers. c-program
Design online table booking system for a restaurant
design an online backup system
Where do you see yourself in 5 years
Why microsoft
Write a C++ code to reverse the order of words in a string, without using any additional buffer.
Why do you apply MS?
given two sorted linked list, merge them into one linked list.
Reverse the characters of a string, minus the whitespace.
Reverse a linked list
Remove Duplicates from an array
How would you design a IM application
How would you test a lift?
Describe alpha beta pruning.
Given an airplane with 50 rows and 3 rows on each seat and the weights of all 150 passengers. How will you place the passengers so that the torque is minimized around the middle. Like balancing a seesaw.
What values would you use to test the code you wrote.
Write code to find the smallest amount of change you can make from a imputed value.
Prove that this sentence “A man, a plan, a canal: Panama” is a palindrome using code. They also had a couple of questions continue off of that one such as how would you break the code.
Given 3-4 words from a search entry, how would you determine location context for the search?
what is the most technological product you have used recently and why?
how would you improve a passenger’s rest room experience on a first-class flight.
Solve the Bellevue parking problem
Given a linked list, remove the maximum element(s) from the list.
For example: 1, 7, 4, 9, 2, 9, 1, you would remove both instances of 9.
Why Microsoft?
Why should I hire you?
given a list of 32bit inter. return a 64 bit int. Without hardware support
Swap two adjacent node of a linked list.
Asked about how to locate a element in an rotated, sorted array.

You’ve been given an array that is sorted and then rotated.


Let arr = [1,2,3,4,5] which is sorted and then rotated say twice to the right to give


find common ancestor in binary tree
remove repeated letter in paragraph
sort array
describe the most interesting project you’ve done
Remove a node from a singly linked list.
Concatenate two strings replacing every space or set of multiple spaces with a single dash
Given a string of characters figure out how many palindromes are in the list of words.
You have two results from a database query. Check if they return the same thing.
Write a function that will calculate the angle between the the hour and minute hands of a clock given the time. Also, as I was interviewing for a test position they asked me to test the function after it was written
explain the ospf adjacency process.
Design an elevator system.
Design an oven for a handicapped person.
According to you what is a good code?
How to test a elevator?
How do you find a target string in a source string?
How do you like programming?
Why Microsoft and not some company like Honeywell?
Given a binary tree of nodes, design naming conventions for each node so if a message comes to the root node, it will get routed to the desired node. Implement routing logic for each node.
Given a set of rectangles of fixed heights and widths, write an application that will fit as many of them as possible into a squire of the specified size.
why do you want to work at microsoft?
what’s the most important project you had?
Reverse words in a String
Write the data structure for dictionary
You are on a game show. There are three doors, behind one of which is a prize and the other two is a chunk of coal, and the host knows which door holds the prize. You choose door #1. Before it is opened, the host opens door #3 and reveals a lump of coal. You have the choice to stick with the door you chose originally or switch to door #2. What do you do?
Design a vending machine for drinks.
Phone interview 1: How would you test an instant messenger system? How would you sort a large array?
Phone interview 2: Write a function that accepts a string and returns the number of words in it. How will you test it?
What’s hardest technical challenge you have ever met before
Design a multi-media cookbook for American families
In-string sorting
B-tree parsing
Design a better system for airport queues.
What don’t you like about Windows 7?
How does Facebook affect our business?
How does Google make money off Android?
How will you test a triangle making program
How will you design a ATM machine for children
What piece of new technology have you seen that you think will be a resounding success one day? What have you seen that is new but is doomed to fail? And why?
Something related to binary search and a flat file datastore.
write a function that turns a string of integer to a string of English words of that integer.
bit manipulation.
write a sqrt function.
Data structures and algorithms, with a bit of design and some soft questions about your goals and background.
Tell me about an occasion where you could not get along with your coworkers or friends and how you dealt with them.
How to implement a stack by a queue?
How would you improve the clip art search on office.com?
How would you implement a video game that saved on the cloud?
Write a function that takes a linked list of integers and outputs a linked list with the sum of the pairs. Ex: 10-5-4-2 outputs 15-6
Write a function that outputs the number of words in a string.
How many bits does a microsoft tag have? (ex: http://www.gomonews.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/microsoft-tag-792594.jpg)
What was your hardest programming project? Was it successful? How would you improve upon it?
Design elevator system for 1000 storey building..
Re-design airport baggage system..
design clock for blind
write a program to reverse a string; reverse a string and not reverse the words
How would you describe a MOSFET to your mum?
Some truth table logic.
Explain your weakness, and give specific example [note: yes, should not have been unexpected]
You are asked to develop the next version of Bing (say!)… What are the considerations that you make? Analyse every issue that comes up? How will you design the system to handle failures? Write solid code for giving suggestions if the user makes a spelling mistake in the search query? how will you handle the same issue for spelling mistakes in proper nouns?
Implement a modified bubble sort.
Write the kernel of the OS of a stopwatch
how to use a robot arm to sort a deck of 10 cards, and have their faces face down. The arm knows where each card is and can only flip group of cards from the top
Design a children’s cell phone.
The government has decided that driving on the left side of the road is safer and better than the right. What process would you use to implement this new system of driving?
Describe your work history over the past X years.
How comfortable are you in a management/leadership role?
Find cycle in linked list.
Reverse words in paragraph of text.
Connect levels of a tree.
Print tree level by level.
Designing a process scheduling system that will call a certain process at a give possibility.
If a sorted array is rotated, how to find how many times it has been rotated.
design question which needed hash table
write code to implement strstr() function of C
One array has size n and n elements . second array has size n+m and m elements. both the arrays are sorted. we need to get n+m elements in second array in sorted order. Linear time algorithm was expected
Unexpected questions related to some basic knowledge about the industry that I would expect Microsoft team members to know.
If you’re collaborating with a member of another team, how would you resolve a conflict?
There are 3 baskets. one of them have apples, one has oranges only and the other has mixture of apples and oranges. The labels on their baskets always lie. (i.e. if the label says oranges, you are sure that it doesn’t have oranges only,it could be a mixture) The task is to pick one basket and pick only one fruit from it and then correctly label all the three baskets.
Write an iterative method (on the whiteboard) to provide an in-oder traversal of a binary search tree.
Write a method (on the whiteboard) to reverse a singly linked list.
in a linked list, how do you delete a node and still link them together
Explain internet security — what are some of the vulnerability points?
How does design of a product change when your customers are developers or it professionals rather than everyday consumers?
There were a number of logic puzzles within the interview, the one I remember was comparing the height of a body of water with a ship sitting on top of it, compared to the heigh after the ship had been sunk.
Who owns the customer account
Out of the two , is composition preferred over inheritance? What are the tradeoffs?
Application of Divide and Conquer Solution – Binary Search Tree for a problem
Question asked: Given a binary tree, with root and child node pointers given, devise a formula to calculate the pointer to every node’s closest right node on the same level, if one exists
What’s the “next big” market area or venture MSFT should get into? And why?
What is your view and opinion of the competitive landscape in [insert: vertical]? How and why does it impact MSFT’s products and revenue streams?
Write a function that will take in a phone number and output all possible alphabetical combinations (found in a normal phone keypad) for it.
How would you test the function above?
How do you deal with difficult people?
There are n stations and you have the fairs for travelling from one station to the other. How will you find the minimum cost of travelling from s0 to sn, provided you can do (n-1) max hops?
given an array with N elements (~ 2n+1), which contains positive integers. All the numbers are repeating (i.e. they exist in pairs) except one. Find the non-repeating number.
Tell me your three biggest weaknesses
Can you please describe your “x” project in your resume?
what are the test cases of vending machine?
Describe an instance when you rallied a group of people and executed an idea you had
What’s your leadership style?
given root of a binary tree, find out if it is a binary search tree or not? provide test cases for it.
What does branding mean to you?
1:1 first round :Write code for which returns the in-order successor of a given node . (Hint : Fn. prototype has to be : node* in_order(node* current_node);
1:1 round 2: Given a string find all the palindromes in the string.
1:1 round 3: This was the toughest for me . Given a database of string . And a record of words and replacement pairs , such that if a given word occured in the string it had to be replaced by the replacement pair provided in the record.
GM:1(called as AA ) :: Given a character array of consisting of A-Z characters , i had to replace a series of characters in the following manner :AAAABBCCC
to be replaced by 4A2B3C.
Given a string consisting of characters A,B,C in any order . Sort them such that all A`s,B`s and C`s are placed together .
As a manager who you will hire in your new position?
I honestly don’t remember the details of the interview questions.
What was the most technically challenging project that you ever did ?
What is good code ?
Link the leaf nodes of a binary tree into a linked list
what is your major research area?
what is your expectation from us?
Convert string to number. “123” to 123
Describe how to design a robotic telescope. Talk about hardware (robotics/sensors); talk about software (linear algebra/control).
Find the common parent of any 2 roots in a tree (not a binary tree or any tree where parent have numerical relevance).
Tell me a time when you had to deal with difficult problem and what was the problem
How do you verify if a binary search tree is correct?
a car to travel a loop of cities w/ gas stations
you can look up this on careerCup
a size N array with elements of value 1~N-1, how do you find any duplicate in the array? (linear time, no extra memory overhead)
What did you think when you first saw the job description?
Tell me what you think of C++ templates
Test an elevator in a hospital.
We have numbers 1-1’000’000, except one that is missing, how do you find that number?
How would you work out how many queries on Bing are related to Music and Entertainment?
Tell me about your research/thesis
How would you optimize an SQL query?
Design .
When was a time you needed to give bad news
Describe Semaphores and Deadlocks
How would you design the Matchmaking service used by Xbox Live ?
The only question was the design of the elevator
What features of a microsoft software would you see need to be improve
Manipualte a string to place even char in leftt n odd in the right
Some puzzles, I don’t remember
You are out with a customer at dinner and the customer is obviouly drunk and is continuting to bad mouth not only you but Microsoft. Basically saying Microsoft sucks and you don’t provide me any value. What do you do?
The MS Account rep offers you tickets to a professional basket ball game so you can take the customer and hopefully discuss a certain project. You and the customer discuss a project while at the game and he informas that he’s decided to go with a non-microsoft solution and tells you not ot say anything to the MS account rep about it. Upon returning from the game.the Account rep asked what you talked about and whether the customer has made a decision about the solution. What do you do? Do you tell the Account Rep?
what could you improve/change in this (given) smartphone
if you were given the xbox, what would you do with it?
How do you test a keyboard
Given an array of size N, filled with unique integers between 0 and N, how would you determine which integer was missing from the array. An initially simple question that was made increasingly harder after each correct answer to incorporate such things as memory/processor limitations, etc.
How would you improve youtube?
Tell me your most interesting technical contribution and why?
Design and implement Run Length Encoding data compression system.
throw away everything but one best feature in MS word.
explain your project in a few seconds. and in two min as if you were at a conference.
design DNS.
Write the code for the Producer-Consumer problem.
How could IE be expanded to other platforms?
Replace substrings of a string with a given string.
Find similar elements from two linked lists and return the result as a linked list
If you have an array of strings with numbers on it, return the integer value.
Complexity of a program to calculate factorial recursively
Design a program or features that you think will be useful for a small business (you will be given a scenario)
write strcmp
explain virtual function call mechanism at memory level
reverse an int
find number of annahrams of a given word in the given text file, also print them.
how to improve hotmail?
Print a tree one row at a time, zigzag the direction of printing the row as u go down the tree.
Reverse a list
measure the max transferring speed of a hard disk only using copy command
How to test multi tenancy database system
How would you design a database for a highschool?
A question about finding the shortest path between two points on a graph. With no information about where the second point was located in relation to the first problem.
Describe MVC (Model-View-Controller)
Design a template processing system that a small business owner would be able to use.
techniques for retrieving data fast from the web
handling clients requests
1)Line of code in C++
2)Test a keyboard for a comman man
3)Design a keyboard for a child
4)Design a alarm clock for a child
Given a Java BigInteger, implement the add method.
How would you describe internet to kinder garden children?
How would you design a cell phone for a both blind and deaf person?
What is your understanding of the position?
reverse an array in place
Remove the duplicates from a linked-list.
Design a mouse and how would you test it.
How do you design a coffee shop
Find the missing number in a list of continuous number
On excel, you need to return the sequence of number for alphabet.
if you got “AA” you need to return 27
Reverse a link list. Try to do it recursively as well.
how to detect a loop in a linked list.
Focus on key skill areas, like communications, collaboration, intellectual horsepower, etc.
card shuffling algorithm
Given a single linked list, tell me how to remove the first instance of an element in the list. Then modify your solution to remove all instances of the element.
Design a water bottle.
How to would you find out whether a substring occurs in a given string?
How to find the least common ancestor of two elements in a binary search tree?
Something about finding a minimal element in the matrix
Given a 2D integer array, write a method to check whether or not it is a valid sudoku puzzle.
Design a queue
How will you swap the contents in two variables in C?
Why do you want to work for Microsoft?
Write code in your favorite programming language that will accept two strings and return true if they are anagrams.
Design a function that would perform the search and replace function found in MS Word.
What is the a ideal programmer or software developer looks like? If the ideal model has grade 10, what will be your grade?
What is the most proficient programming language to you?
What is your ideal job position?
I was asked to write some code on paper. The question was to create a function that took in two rectangles and to return true if they overlap and false if they don’t. I was then asked to flip the paper and to create 10 cases to test my code.
Write a function that returns the 5th element from the end in a singly linked list of integers, in one pass, and then provide a set of test cases against that function. Please do not use built-in linked list classes. Instead, define your own class or structure.
Speicific SQL query questions
Tell me what you did when you had to deal with a very difficult person.
What features would you add to Excel and why?
How would you handle this problem which we ran into today. There is a security issue with CSSI attacks that only occurs for customers in this region of the world.
Write a function that takes an input string, consisting of several words separated by spaces, and print out each word reversed, keeping the same order within the string.
how to reverse words in a string preserving the formatting
how to find the closest predecessor of a node in binary by doing inorder traversal.
Describe your history
How would you describe you work ethic
Describe what mechanism you would use for an electronic entry card used in hotels, such that they would remain in used only for a week or so
A sorted list is rotated, and find the index for the first value.
No difficult questions really. One of the questions was how would you find third biggest number in the array.
What was the most challenging design problem and why was it challenging?
Traverse through a linked list and remove duplicates
Design an interface for a camera that will allow users to upload photos to facebook
How do you swap two numbers without declaring temporary variable?
Write a function to turn a string into an integer and test it
You are hired to make entries into a database. Your boss edits and entry but does not save it at the moment. You edit the same entry and save it. After this your boss goes and saves his edit thereby overwriting your entry.

What would you change in the database to avoid such a situation?

Discuss a software product say Bing, prioritize its features and do a competitive analysis
How do you shuffle a deck of cards randomly?
Tell me about yourself…
How would you figure out how to get what you need for this position?
How do you deal with abiguity?
Print all permutations of a string *using no extra memory\data structures* (pointer variables are ok)
+ after i solved that it became tougher – handle duplicates (E.g aaab permutation should not print duplicates)
Write a routine to find index of first occurance of a character in a string
E.g “advzzzza” find(z) Returns 3
How to reverse a string?
Tell me some of your software experiences
Tell me some leadership positions
They asked what the most technically difficult project I have worked on was, and how I over came it.
What was the worded decision you have ever made at the job. Describe about when you really screwed up at the job and the consequences
There is a disk on a turn table. Half of it is black, and the other half is white. It is rotating in constant speed, but it’s rotating fast so that you can’t see whether it’s going clockwise or counterclockwise. You also have a set of stationary sensors you can install anywhere which can tell whether the color of a spot has changed from black to white, or vice versa. What is the minimum number of sensors needed to find out which way the disk is rotating? What is the best, average, worst time to figure out the direction? If you use more sensors, can you improve the best, average, worst time? How can you accomplish that? If you are given only one sensor, how can you find out the direction, assuming you can change one constraint of the problem?
How would you get authentication to work across domains
Find the anagrams in a dictionary
Copy one Linked list to another
How would you compare MS Corporate Strategy to IBM ?
How would you position cloud computing with a CIO ?
What do you like about Messenger?
Suppose you are to release a software with a certain set of features on a certain tight deadline. Yet, your team was not able to complete all the agreed-upon features. What would you do?
Tell me about your most recent project experience?
Tell me about your technical experience including tools you most experienced with during project at your previous employer?
question about tree traversal problem.
Design and code malloc().
Appetude test
Given a linked list with cycle, find the cycle.
Given the pre-order and post-order print out of a binary tree, reconstruct it.
Implement the function strstr. Bing it for more information.
you have 100 doors in a row that are all initially closed. you make 100 passes by the doors starting with the first door every time. the first time through you visit every door and toggle the door (if the door is closed, you open it, if its open, you close it). the second time you only visit every 2nd door (door #2, #4, #6). the third time, every 3rd door (door #3, #6, #9), etc, until you only visit the 100th door.
You have a pile of coins. One of them is counterfeit, and its weight is different from the other coins. All of the other coins weigh the same. You are given a balance. How would you find the counterfeit coin? Now code it up.
Describe a time where you solved a hard coding problem on your own.
Why do you want to work at Microsoft?
How would you test a vending machines? Write some test cases.
Although we would be hiring you to represent a certain product set, what would you response be if we were to withdraw from that particular market?
What would you do if you found out that someone in your team is stealing the company?
Give examples from your last two positions where you successfully handled an escalated customer issues.
Are you a leader or a follower?
What are your pet peeves when working with others and how do you handle working with individuals who display those traits?
What aspect of you education prepated you for this role?
write a program to check that opening and closing braces match
Given a sequence


Complete it.

Reverse words in string
Find a duplicate number in an array of size n.(elements will be 1…n)
Describe a project you did that you were really excited about. (I was a grad student candidate.)
would you be able to tell a duplicate query in SQL?
Why do you want to work for Microsoft?
What is your 5 year plan?
Write a function reverse every word in a sentence.
Tell me about a situation when you handled an employee whose performance was good but was a bad team player
The SQL team has identified a number of features important to various customers/constituencies. Explain how you would prioritize them
The questions are meant to be confidential for obvious reasons. In general, they covered topics like BSTs, Graphs, String manipulation, multi-threading synchronization & collections.
What has Microsoft attempted in the last decade that would be considered mismanaged by the general public?
How will your post graduate education and experience allow you to excell at Microsoft?
Profit and loss management
Indian customer interaction experience
make an OO design of bowling game
how do you process data from a 2 MG text file?
Sort array.
there are three buckets with a label each: oranges, apples, oranges + apples
the labels are guaranteed to be wrong
make minimum draws from the buckets and tell which bucket contains what?
How to do a test for the code?
How is your feeling about doing test for other people?
Given an array of integers, write a function to find the list of all pairs whose sum equals a given value. Discuss and give time/space complexities of your approach(es).
How to find the middle node of a list.
suppose u open a site, login, and open few links in it, the interviewer asked me hw can u b sure dat the 4th page being opened is for the id u entered in the login page? i.e basically on sessions
Shortest path algo, BFS, Linklist as polynomial and operations on it
What is a singleton class
what is the difference between delete and truncate in sql
What is a Context Switch?
(question related to OS internals)
Think about various approaches of reversing a linked list. Pros and Cons.
Implement a lock-free queue/stack/… using atomic test-and-set functions.
How would you design a hotel for your college?
Example of a problem you solved
Why do you not apply for a job at Google?
How do you resolve conflict?
What do you do if you don’t have time to finish your deliverables before the deadline?
Write an algorithm to parse a string for all non white space characters
Reverse a string in place
Reverse the words in a string in place
You have a machine that can create anything. You just have to specify the details, and voila, it will give you the output. Design test cases for such a machine
Two airline companies, Kingfisher and Jet airways want to do a merger. Design a database migration scheme, so that no inconsistencies and redundancy occur. Assume suitable data and brief on the problems you might face.
Reverse a string
Problem of concurrent transactions done by two persons of a joint account at two different ATM Machines. How is it managed without introducing any inconsistency in balance of the account holders?
Question on an existing project I had done, regarding online quiz competition.
Why do you want to leave your current employer?
Tell me about a time that you had to give bad news to an important customer and how you handled it. What was the result?
Tell me about a good sale that you made, from start to finish, and then tell me about one that didn’t go so well.
How do you test strcpy library function in C?
Sort given strings
Reverse a linked list
int getCount(int[] arr, int num)
What can you do for me that I haven’t already seen from others (Real question is why are you different from you competitors)
how would you code the Fibonacci numbers in javascript
If i were testing a website, how would I go about doing so?
Describe how you would approach your first 180 days to deliver success in role?
What you do not like in your current job?
What is your leadership strategy (Reallllllyyy such questions are asked in lateral interviews????)
Dont remember the most difficult but one of the questions was to shuffle a pack of cards.
How would you account for personality clashes when implementing new plans
Rotate a pic without extra memory
Tell me about yourself in a 30K foot view in 3 minutes
Tell me about the time you had to drive a Feature through
I am in need of hiring a third party consultant to fix a flawed implementation. How should I go about selecting a consulting firm?
How would you promote your software+services offering to your current customers?
scrum process
prioritize tasks with a list of tasks and competing priorities
Write a function that duplicates a singly linked list (each node also has a random reference that points to any of the other nodes).
what are transaction isolation levels in MS SQL server?
does not apply
Some IT departments attempt to keep their vendors from talking to line of business people. Tell me about a time you had to manage a situation where the IT department wanted to restrict access to the end-users and how you overcame that.
Write a method that determines if 2, 3, 4, or 5 integers with values 1-10 passed in an array add up to 15.
Come up with an architecture for determining how many users are currently online playing a game. How do you scale it up and out? Where are the points of failure? Scale to 10M. Scale to 100M. Scale to 1B.
how do you handle difficult cistomers
describe the infrastructural compoments of the product
why you choose microsoft
How would you test a DVD player?
Array vs Linked List
Different Sorting Algorithms and Big O of each
Binary Search Algorithm and Big O for it
Write a method to traverse a Binary Tree
BFS on a binary tree
How would you plan this project?
No he didn’t ask my any unexpected interview questions.
How would you detect and deal with escape (‘\”) characters in some xml?
Write a bit of code using pointers to find a particular position in an array that could only be scanned once.
Design an architecture to solve a particular problem.
Write code to insert / remove item from a linked list.
How does TCP/IP protocol handle packet collisions?
How do you address conflict among your team especially coming in as an outsider?
Design and test a system to figure out if a shape is closed or not
How does TCP work?
How would you handle relationship with internal sales folks
How to set expectation without hampering the customer satisfaction
Maximum value contigous sub sequence. need to give all test cases
Find diameter of binary tree.
Linked list questions
Do you know what this is? (Points to a projector)
Can you explain how it works?
Tell me about what you see yourself doing in 5 years
Design a recorder for a car which records radio channels
What value you added to a business decision of a business partner?
Just fill out the form for the interview process and send it!!
How will you test an array collection?
Can you tell us your programming experience
Can you tell us the most important programming task that you’ve ever encountered?
FInd nth number in a Fibonacci series.
Test a calculator
sorting question
Why would you like to join
How will it benefit you in your future endaevours
If you were to design a GPS product for the 60+ population, what features would you include in it?
what is your sales style
Trim a URL address by parsing it and if a “/../” string is obtained remove previous folder and print the final URL.
What would you look for in hiring a person for this position?
How would you create and launch a beta for office 2010?
Display the first 3 character of a word(string)
Given an int array and an int X, find out if two elements sum up to X
Given an int array, find the sequence of elements that has the largest sum
Implement a circular queue in C. Pay attention to boundary cases. Also be sure to allow for arbitrary expansion of the queue on demand.
Why do you want this job and what can bring to Microsoft that we don’t already have?
If a tester comes to you and says that there is a bug in the software and we cant deliver it because it cant be fixed till tomorrow(delivery promised) what would you do. Would you ship it? Analyze the question
What are the various means by which you can generate a fibonacci series?
The differences between recursive and iterative implementations?
What is the difference between compile-time and run-time
Three buckets of fruits as follows: apple, orange, apple+orange. Label on each bucket indicating the contents. The label is guaranteed to be wrong (not what is in the bucket). What is the minimum number of fruits that you need to remove from the buckets in order to say with certainty which bucket contains which type of fruits.
I was asked the typical questions. Nothing that hard really. I prepared pretty well.
How will you test a search engine
What is context switching
What is quick search
How would you prioritize conflicting stakeholder interests?
If there are jobs coming in from different servers, and I want to execute only job at a time, based on first-come first serve basis, what data struct should i use?
how will you check if a tree is a binary search tree?
Basic questions regarding my graduate project.
Simple pattern matching question.
how will you search for “love” in a string “I love New York”
Write a method to find if 2 strings are anagrams.
Write code to give all possible phone numbers given the digits in the number. This is basically translating something like 1800-myinterview to actual numbers.
reverse a linked list
Interviewer asked for certain types of writing samples that I did not have.
Name a time that through your hard work and infuence, you received a result that you did not intend…what did you do?
Types of editing
Describe your self (4 times for each interview)
How is a context switch handled by the operating system?
How would store and load a tree in file?
Design a book store that integrates with a university
what is the one thing you are most proud of accomplishing at microsoft
what is the one thing you are not so proud of in your career at microsoft
Tell me about a time when you sought to influence change and failed.
How would you spend you first 60 days?
You need to have a release with 50 features that are all mandatory. How would you handle a situation where the engineering manager told you that the budget for those features is a greater amount than what you have available and you believe the estimate is too large?
Tell me about a important breakthrough in one of your previous roles, and explain why it was a breakthrough
Given XY coordinates of a line and a rectangle, calculate the where the line will intercept the rectangle.
Explain the setup time, hold time of digital circuit and their effect on the overall frequency.
What are your biggest strengths & weaknesses?
Why should we hire you?
implement FIFO using LIFO
LIFO second was on the lines of selecting random nodes from a binary search tree
Return same elements from two arrays as fast as you can.
Write code to search a substring from another string
Why do you want to work with Microsoft?
How many cars in Chicago?
Why Microsoft specifically?
Write a linked list implementation.
Tell me about a time when you had to push back on your manager ?
How much would you be willing to pay to join the following game?
Start with 0 dollars on the table. You flip a fair-sided coin. If the coin is heads, I add another dollar, and you flip again. If the coin is tails, you walk away with the cash on the table.
What if I place a cap D on the amount of money you can earn (alternatively, you can flip the coin up to D times)? Now, what is the amount of $ you are willing to pay to play this game?
General Conditional Probability Questions, String Manipulation Questions
What are you looking for most out of a work place environment.
What do you do?
What do you have that all of the other top candidates don’t have if you take out, background, experience, leadership, customer passion and most everything else?
Tell me a time when someone surprised you with their actions.
string question. Can’t exactly remember. But has to use hash tables.
Explain virtual table concept
Given a file that has a C++ program in it, how would you verify that the code in it is syntactically correct?
Describe how you would drive action and response from executives by managing without authority.
What is definition and what is declaration in C
The student cards are 7 digit numbers, from 0000000 to 9999999. If they are not in order and I would like to make it in-order. I will give you 6 helpers, how will you help me to solve this problem and the complexity of solving this problem.
Design a remote control for a 5 year old.
Test a keyboard.
Given a string, reverse the order of words in the string.
Implement a queue, with a constraint. I am not sure but I think it was smallest or something
Build a binary tree with a sibling link. so that you have a linked list connecting all the nodes on a given level.
Store the words in a document.
Tile puzzle. What data structure represents its, defend your choice. And how to solve it, given a function that tests if it is done.
Test a spiral bound notebook
How to reverse the words in a string.
Given a non chromatic screen, how would you turn on or off the value of pixel.
How would you design an alarm clock for visually impaired
Design a thermostat. (for PM)
Write modified version of string compare.
Describe service level architecture
Write a shell program that recursively lists all files and directories below a certain node.
What is AD?
Design a system to help elementary school students with homework from home
Given a string, reverse it.
reverse a linked list
Describe your ideal job.
How much does the ice in a hockey rink weigh?
write a function to return the attribute value if input is in the form of attribute=”value”. write test cases
write function to remove the repeating characters from a given string
Design an alarm clock for the blind
You are the product manager for Microsoft Outlook. Define the next version of MS Outlook
Why do you want to work at Microsoft?
How do you deal with ambiguity?
Give an instance in your life in which you were faced with a problem and you tackled it successfully.
Write a program for the Queen in the chess.
How to implement mutual exclusion in Operating systems ? for 2 processes ? for n process ?
How to generate 2 independent random variables uing a single random generator ?
A situation of a technical problem encountered years ago, and figure out a way to solve it.
implement queue with stacks
What two questions where the hardest during the interview day and why?
Circular link list
Character Array map question
What was your favorite class in school so far and why?
Given two strings, how would you remove from the first string all the characters which appear in the second string? Code it in C on the white board.
What does the yield keyword in C# do?
explain why I felt I was the best candidate for the job
How would I rate my previous employer
In technical roles, expect a coding test. How would you solve …. In any role expect the stupid HR questions (what is your greatest strength?) There’s a list of them on the internal website for managers to through at you, even though there is nothing to tell them how to interpret the results.
Design a remote for kids 9-12
If you have all the numbers from 1 to 1’000,000, except one of them. How would you find out which number is missing?
find the path in a binary tree from root to leaf, if the sum of nodes values equals a given number
Why do want to work at Microsoft?
What is your dream position at Microsoft?
What is good code in your opinion?
If I call you to my office, close the door and ask you what the temperature is outside my office, how would you find it?
Questions varied based on the position and technology
Should we launch a product in XYZ market? Why or Why not?
find longest palindrome in a string
favorite microsoft product and why? How would you improve it?
tell me about a time when…
Tell me a time when you have to lead a virtual team?
Situational question about how I would handle a certian situation as a CEO of an company. Don’t remember the details but it was about the product I was not familiar with.
How would you add two linked lists which represent a number, they have one of the digits among 0-9 in there data field
What do you know about the division. Which specific services are you interested in.
Why do you want to work for Japan for an american company?
Why would I use pointer to pointer?
How would you test a vending machine ?
Behavioural question – give examples where your communication skills were tested
Are you married? Have kids?
How would you decide which results to show first, if the search query was “New York” ?
Design an oven
design a large scale distributed and fault tolerant client-server system
Implement splay trees.
Why are you no longer with your previous employer?
Can you explain the Gap in employment since you were laid-off in May, 2009 until now – March 2010.
I don’t remember clearly. All the questions were based on algorithms and programming.
How does the virtual keyword function internally?
Reverse a linked list.
Find Longest Common Substring
Replicate a given linked list with 2 type of pointers. 1 the usual one. The other pointer points to random node in the list
How would you explain database system to your grandma
If we gave you a million dollars to start your own company, what kind of company would you start?
Write a class that takes in a string of bits and has operations for left shifting the string.
design an experiment to optimize the quality of search results on a google-like search engine.
Give an idea to show how to rearrange the array a1, a2, …, an, b1, b2, … bn into a1, b1, a2, b2, …, an, bn with O(n) computation time cost and O(1) extra memory cost.
What low level features of Windows 7 are interesting?
Design a circular queue
Describe your testing procedure
what new feature i would add to the cables converter?
Given a dictionary and set of characters, find all possible words
Generate all permutations of a string and determine if each is in the dictionary. Find an efficient data structure for the dictionary.
Delete the Nth node from the end of a linked list.
Think of any product. Design it. Define data structures for it and write algorithms for the methods used.
How would you search m strings in a given text in an efficient manner?
A set of line segments represent a geographical region (enclosing line segments). you have a couple of such sets. All together, the regions form a complete closed Big region. Find the bounding line segments for the total Big region.
Write code to remove redundant spaces from a string in C
Write code in C to replace a particular character in a string with k other characters.
Tell me a technical product that was marketed very well. What exactly did they do?
What is your favorite product?
how can you improve it? Which do you hate?
Tell me about a time when one of your projects was delayed. What did you do to bring it back on track?
You’ve recently joined a business group that is struggling to deliver an online service. The product team says everything looks good and doesn’t know why the service is failing. You have two weeks to figure it out. What do you do?
Traverse graph using a non-standard algorithm (interviewer explained the algorithm), then make sure that solution is m/t safe
He gave me an array of unsorted numbers and asked to sort. But the restriction is that any number of reads but number of writes should be minimized.
Design an oven for me.
What is the biggest technical accomplishment that you achieved in the last 2-3 years?
Do you have portfolio items to show?
Ask you to perform some testing on a particular feature in one of their products.
How do test atoi API?
How would you test Excel?
Reverse a linked list.
With two probes, determine the [clockwise/counterclockwise] direction that a plate with 2 different colors (split along a diameter) is spinning.
coding questions.
are you interested in technology, what kind of gadgets do you use
How would MSFT develop a competing product?
Arbitrary precision numbers and fuzzy search
Write code to quantize an image to 256 colors. Write a routine to assign an optimal 256 color palette to an image.
Write a function that has a variable number of for loops. Really, how to enumerate an arbitrary dimensional set of array indicies…
given a monochrome display, light the pixel at (x,y) code
One coding question
How linux system call was handled?
How could you represent days and month using 2 6 sided dice
How to split a binary search tree or some other tree?
testing is about breaking things, describe an example where you found a defect in something by trying to break it.
What was the biggest challenge in your career so far and how did you overcome it?
(without letting you read the job description again) tell me how well you fit the requirements of this position?
explain your project to a people who lives thousands of years ago.
Reverse a link list
Ways of reverse a link-list?
how to print a booklet. Print out the page orders (the pages are printed double sided, each side contains two pages). A follow-up question is how to test it.
Given an array of integers and sum, check whether any combination adds upto the sum. For solve then program in any language.
Maximum common Subsequence
Give me an example where you have had to defy your boss when you knew he was wrong, and still delivered the requirement?
Design Remote Control with 2 buttons
Build a 3D maze solver.
reverse link list
find mirror of a binary tree
Tell me about your school project or previous work.
How do you combine two linked lists and sort them.
Name a product that you think has been well advertised and what would be the next step for it.
Tell me about yourself and your projects.
Why did you choose ‘Development’ as your first preference in the candidate interest form ?
Given an array of integers write a program to find two elements that sum up to a given no.
How would merge two sorted linked lists without creating a new one so that the outcome is sorted as well.
Write a function to list all documents under your C: drive.
How do work with your boss who is not technically as strong as you are?
To many to list!
Tell me about yourself
Why do you want to work for Microsoft?
Design a microwave with a touchscreen
Search all the number between a range in a binary search tree.
Binary search in rotated sorted array. (on-campus question)
how do you test a stapler?
Tell me about your managment style?
Give me an example of a time you let someone go?
In discussing a previous project: what mental model did you use and why?
Arrange the two strings
Replace the a to A.
Find the last unique character in a character string
How did you handle a challenge?
How would you promote XYZ product?
Describe your most difficult team work experience
Why do you want to leave your current job?
Reversal of letters in each word of a sentence in the most efficient way
Name 3 technical strengths. Name 3 non-technical strengths. Name a weakness.
Why do you want to work at Microsoft?
I was asked to determine three things about the computers that need improvement and suggest improvement.
How buffer overflow works
How would you test the passport login process and its architecture?
i)doubly linked list pairwise swap
ii) 2D matrix with nums increasing in right direction and downwards direction. Search for a target number.
How would you test (a physical object in the room or something else)? Totally unexpected when asked to tell them how you would proceed to test a spoon. This is to test your testing aptitude.
How to come out of a maze given that you can move one step at a time and you cannot turn left.
In employee table there is a self reference to boss (who is also an employee). How to find the number of people that work under a given person for his entire tree.
Given a 2d matrix of numbers where each row and column is sorted in increasing order, describe an efficient algorithm to test whether a given number is in the matrix.
Reverse a linked list
How can you explain computer networks to kinder garden kids
Write a function that returns the longest palindrome in a string. Not just the first one or any palindrome, but the longest. The String is a long sequence of characters, spaces included.
Write test cases for the above function.
Describe a strategy you implemented.
How would you design the RSS functionality for a cellphone if the cellphone is placed behind a firewall.
Implement a hashtable using programing language of your choice.
Implement BinarySort and the partition function for Quicksort.
Design the architecture of a server to back up emails.
Design a universal remote control.
Given a large string (haystack), find a substring (needle) on it.
How do you find whether a flower in a bit map image is connected?
How would you deal with a certain key stakeholder team that our business is highly dependent on and does not collaborate very well and you cannot burn a bridge with and need to bend your way?
How would you deal with an employee that wasn’t performing?
How would you make strtok?
How will you write a function to merge two sorted arrays assuming one of them have enough space to hold all the members.
What sort of specifications would I create for the team?
What did you learn from your work on X? Did anything go wrong? What did you do about it and what did you learn?
How would you have influenced the key decision-makers in regard to XYZ Project?
Find a duplicate in array of given numbers.
If you completed a project successfully, but there was a perception that the project was not successful, how would you prove otherwise?
It’s been a little while, but I believe some of the tough questions were surrounding internal names for design practices that weren’t common to me.
Write a function to format a string of something into a proper telephone number format.
How would you test a coke can?
How did you convince a client technically when in a difficult situation?
Write an algorithm to verify if a tree is a binary search tree.
Design crossword game that suggests words based on letters already filled in.
Write the shoot() method for a game of battleship. Also describe the data structures backing the game.
EPM is currently a major thrust for numerous companies. How do you see EPM as a solution for the SME market?
How would you test a toothpaste package product?
You have $10 million to promote Xbox. How will you break it up?
Sort binary array with all zero first. Use only single pass. Write C# code on windows live meeting.
coding skill. fairly easy. but need practice.
Write test cases for a doorknob
There are 3 cars travelling in a road from point a to pont b, you have to pick one car, which one do you choose?
How do you guarantee that there is no deadlock?
Write an algorithm that will determine the correct moves for given cribbage board.
Describe in detail all the steps that happen from the time you type www.microsoft.com in your internet browser until you receive the page back. Now add all details in case this were a secure page.
Asked a complex Question on Trees in Data structures .Don’t exactly remember it
Print all all possible string combinations from entering a variable number of cell phone keys.
Given an unfair coin, devise an algorithm to produce a fair coin’s output.
How would you design Solitaire?
how to merge two linked lists without using temp node
Implement a counting semaphore using only binary mutexes
I was asked to come up with edit distance algorithm and code it on white board. For someone who has not gone over the algorithm recently this will be a tricky problem to solve.
Test a safety card
Write an algorithm to pick the mayor of a town. There is a random number that is chosen and every nth person on the list is deleted until the mayor is chosen.
give me an example where you were the users’ advocate and worked on changing the UI for the users against the engineers design.
How would you find the intersection of two arrays of integers?
I’m thinking of a number 1 to 999. You may ask 3 questions to try to figure it out. You may not ask questions such as, what is the number, or what is the first/second/third digit.
How many ballons would fit in the room you are currently in?
Write code to generate all permutations of the keypad of a cellphone
Rebuild a FAT table from scratch given some basic conditions/rules.
Show me how to test a graph (x and y axis) using ten lines.
Asked one question to solve: The “Ransom Note” problem.
Puzzle about horses and races. Find min number of races to find the fastest horse (see web).
Write a method (in Java) that would find the longest common substring in two strings
Please write or describe in words how to remove every other entry in a linked list, in the programming language of your choice.
Write a function to find the maximum sum of sub array where the array can have negative and positive numbers.
Discuss a time when I faced a difficult challenge or obstacles on a technical project.
what do you see are some of the most important new technologies emerging?.
Why do you want to join us?
– what’s the difference between inner join and left outter join
– implement a function that reverts a string in local
Gather the requirements for an ATM for kids.
Design the UI for a product.
Design the UI for an online restaurant ordering system.
Design a cell phone for kids.
Write code to reverse a linked list in C++ or Java
What is your favorite Microsoft product and why?
Write a program for lowest common ancestor problem
How would you test a program that counts minivans on a highway
Transform a Roman Number stored as an integer into a string representation. Use any language. Provided methods for converting any single digit into it’s respective character.
A typical question would involve marketing a product Microsoft currently offers. I was asked how I would develop a marketing strategy around Live Search (now Bing).
Given a square Grid of numbers, Considering all the numbers at the boundary as 1 layer and numbers just inside as another layer and so on how would you rotate each of the layers of the numbers by a given amount.
Remove the duplicates from an unsorted array of integers.
What is your favorite software product. Why do you like it? What are any suggested improvements.
Design a phone for a mother.
Design a mobile phone for 3-6 years old kids.
Design a ticketing system to solve the problem of large queues outside ticket counters on Metro stations in India.
Present a business case for Microsoft Office on Symbion Platform.
Future of smart phones and where do you see them after 5 years from now.
What has been the hardest thing for you to convince your superiors of and what did you do to get them to agree?
Return the sum of the 2 largest integers in an array. Make this more efficient.
Write a code snippet to general the first 10 Fibonnaci numbers.
Imagine you’re a door company, and the company that sells you your door handles decides to raise the price. You now want to make your own handles and enter the door handle market. How would you design your door handle
You are given two numbers M and N, ex. 10 and 15, and array with N-M numbers. In that array are numbers between M and N. Ex( 11,12,13,11,14). The numbers are not ordered, and can be repeated. How do you find the number(s) which is not listed in the array.
How would you reverse the words in a string?
How will you test a Stapler
How will you test the UI for a file dialog in Windows
What is the largest project you have managed?
What technologies would you consider yourself expert in?
Searching a page in 100 million pages. What data structure would be optimal?
What did you think of the business alliance between partner company X and MS do to the Mobile division?
How would you improve the product?
Why do you choose to work as a tester
Tell me about a software/technology you like/dislike and why?
Tell me about an interesting project you worked on.
What was your greatest acheivement?
it was something like – you got 5 camels that need to go 500 miles. They need to drink certain amount of water to go 100 miles. But water is available only now and at the destination. Each camel can carry water need for it for the next 100 miles. How do u transport the camels. The question was not tough but I messed up somewhere in the middle.. any case I could solve it in the end.
Implement a solution for the bounded buffer problem where you have a queue of work items and several producer/consumer threads.
How would you design a hotel reservation system?
Where do you look for inspiration?
How do you manage to work with a team member that you aren’t necessarily getting along with?
How to remove every alternate node from a linked list
Given a big image, how will you pan and zoom into the image in a way so as to focus on the important parts ot the image.
How do you create and reserve a linked list? After you have written the function to create the functions, write a function to sort the linked list.
What is your major weakness and how would that apply to this job?
Why are you interested in this position
Solve a problem consisting in transform a roman number to integer value
Give test cases to test that a soda machine works
implement atoi
Describe a time when you were faced with a difficult problem and how you dealt with it.
What would you improve in Windows Vista? It was more focussed towards design since my position was a PM.
How would you determine that a rectangle is not overlapping with another rectangle.
It’s Friday afternoon and you are neck deep in a client deliverable, right then your boss asks you to finish another deliverable. Which one will you choose and why ?
What was a product which was marketed well by Microsoft?
I was asked about clustered or non-clustered indexes.
I was aske to specify as many ways to return the rowcount in the table.
Why do you want to join Microsoft and what domain are you most interested in?
Write code to implement a CD burning software???
How would you go about finding the largest number in a linked list tree?
how would you move mount fuji?
They were all standard industry questions. I was surprised not to be asked any of the legendary Microsoft questions.
Describe your research to me
If we asked 3 of your closest friends to tell us what 3 of your strengths and 3 of your weaknesses are, what would they say?
Be extreme thorough with the resume.Why did you choose a particular major and a project
What can Microsoft do to better compete with Apple in the mobile device space?
Since this was for program management, I expected some ambiguous questions. The main one was : “What would you do if you see a colleague who is running late for a meeting, and is struggling with a vending machine that has taken the cash but not dispensed the soft drink yet ?”
Devise a way to make sure there is always mlik in my fridge.
I was asked to write an algorithm in C++ to sort an array. The function I was to write was to take in a string of letters “b” and “r”. b = a red ball and r = a blue ball. The function was to return an integer with the least number of swaps needed to separate the balls to be next to their own colors…
So for example, RBBR would return 1, since you only need to swap one of the letters to be RRBB or BBRR.
What challenges are prevalent in your current job?
I was asked to integrate the Microsoft on-line shop and Windows Update to be a seemless delivery channel.
Write a function in C that takes a pointer to a string as its input, reverses the string, and returns a pointer to the reversed string.
Test the string reversal function. Can you break it ?
Design a memory management system
Give an algorithm to simulate a fair coin toss from a biased coin
How is the square root function implemented
Given an array with length n-1 which contains integers of the range 1 to n. Each element is distinct and appears only once. One integer is missing. Find the missing integer in linear time using O(1) memory. Now two integers are missing, find them out in linear time using O(1) memory. How about three?
What did you like least about your last position?
Evaluate postfix expression
Explain the difference between HA and DR configurations. When would you decide to use each?
Explain the difference between a physical and logical database diagram.
Describe PKI in detail.
Give me examples of how you handled working on a project with a customer that never seemed to be satisfied. What did you do and what would you do differently now?
Given only a pointer to an arbitrary node in a singly-linked list, how would you delete that node? Are there any cases where this is impossible?
Of all the people that interviewed you today, who was the smartest? How long will it take you to be at that level?
Give me an example of how you resolve conflict?
Give me an example when you have failed in the past.
Describe the perfect mobile phone.
What is your favorite part of developing for (insert mobile os here) ?
Describe the Windows boot process in detail.
find a recurring element in a linked list of unicode characters. If a unicode character/s is found to have a duplicate then just delete that repeating node and adjust the list. The contraint was to not to use any extra memory.
using recursion to traverse a binary tree
Why do you want this job? Why Microsoft? Why now?
Tell me how you would do my ( marketing/engineering) job and do it better?
You have to reach and not go over 700 lbs on this scale. Everything can only be weighed one time. One group of products has already passed, but you have another set that has to be weighed without going over. How will you do this and please diagram it.
why you attend MBA?
Toughest close?
Most difficult client managers?
Why is a manhole cover round?
Questions on string manipulation and string handling. Questions on algorithms and data management. Questions on project and time management.
Business case question about the software of the group for which I was interviewing
Question about problems the group was facing and how I would solve them.
What kind of programs have you worked on before?
What do you think about ring tones as incentives?
Forgot the actual question – but something totally unrelated to the job, like “how will you design a toaster” type question
Replace a character in a string with another one, or another two
How are you going to increase our market share in a segment?
Implement the memcpy function
Phone interview question: Describe how you would implement the C standard library function atoi.
Phone interview question: In C, why is it considered bad form for a function to return a pointer to a stack-allocated variable? What happens if you do it anyway?
Phone interview question: What happens when the “new” operator in C++ fails?
Count the number of words in a string, where a word is defined to be a contiguous sequence of non-space characters.
Determine whether a given binary tree is fully populated, where “fully populated” means that every internal node has exactly two children, and all terminal nodes are at the same depth.
How would you calculate a pixle on a monitor using a singular matrix in memory and change the color
How to write an evaluator for a string like “(1+3 * ( 5 / 4)) and get a numeric result.
Question related to Circular Linked LIst
Questions related to Stacks and List combined
What would you do if the GM had planned for 500K of a marketing campaign, but the other team members decided not to proceed with it? How would you tell the GM that his marketing intiative will not take place.
How do you communicate?
What can you do for us in strategy?
Explain ACID
How many unique paths are there from B-L point to the T-R point of a chess table? What would be your approach to calculate this?
Write a code for finding a certain element in an unsorted array assuming element definitely exists. How can we improve the efficiency?
How would you redesign a social web site to be useable with a game controller.
Why are you looking for a new job.
Count bits in a byte.
How would you go about designing a better vending machine for coke?
What is one functionality you would love to have in a tech device (phone/laptop etc)? How would you design this functionality? What are the considerations you would take into account during this design.
Why are manhole covers round?
Why would you want this job when it is in an area where Microsoft has a poor track record of success?
Code a function in C to get the largest consecutive addition of integer numbers fron an array.
Why should I hire you?
Design a test for ______
Suppose you have a C++ base class and several classes that inherit from it. What might happen if you do not write a virtual destructor for the base class?
I was often asked how I would expect to handle my relative lack of experience in large companies. In retrospect, I almost think this could have been asked more, as it has turned out to be a huge part of the challenge of the new job!
I was asked to write a method which takes an integer as an input parameter and returned a string as the output variable. The string’s value was to be the written format of the integer. For example, if the input was, “1,550,225” the output was, “One million, five hundred and fifty thousand, two hundred and twenty five”
What makes you a good person.
Develop a brochure over the weekend describing my team’s function to its prospective internal stakeholders.
Name three of your positive skills
Name three of your negative skills
Write code using fundemental algorithms
More questions on algorithms and how to write code around that
Why are you the right candidate for this role?
Why do you want to work for Microsoft?
What are your areas of strengths – non-technical and technical?
What ares do you need improvement it?
What would you do if a customer said/did __________?
Why should I bother to hire you?
What is your biggest past mistake at work?
Case questions. You will probably get them.
How you would change a specific product.
The interview was informal. I do not recall any of the questions…
optimization questions
Find exist in maze or prove its non existence.
How would you design a multi-media cookbook?
Assume a text console where somebody is typing input. Whenever the person hits enter, we should display the string that he has entered. The string can be very very long and the program that takes the input and displays should be as fast as possible. Write such a C program
I was asked a variant of the Single Source Shortest Path Problem on a general tree.
I was asked to communicate how to recreate a drawing to someone with their back to me.
Are you willing to travel?
What is the worst business or career decision you ever made and what did you learn from it?
What do you have passion for ?
Tell me how you perceive Apple to be a competitor of Microsoft.
Can’t think of anything truly outside the box.
Recursively reverse a singly linked list.
Connect Four is a game where two players take turns dropping their color discs into a vertically suspended grid. The game ends when a player adds a disc to the playing grid that connects four discs of their color. The connected discs can be in a horizontal, vertical or diagonal line. Write a function to be called after every turn that returns true if the game is over (and false otherwise).
Write an algorithm that does an in-order traversal of a tree recursively. Now, write the same algorithm iteratively.
How would you make other people on different teams to follow a schedule that you set, knowing that they don’t report to you, and have different priorities?
(Interviewer goes to whiteboard and draws a simple shape that looks like a shark fin, turns to me an commands) Design this!
Write an algorithm that calculates the angle between hour and minute hand of a clock for any arbitrary time
Design a mall kiosk with a focus on wrist-watches.
Design a rubik’s cube game.
Explain how the internet works in layman’s terms.
Explain the client logon process.
Given a numeric expression, evaluate the expression and give the result.
For instance:
How to detect loops on a single linked list?
If give you 1 million $ and ask you to change 1 thing for search, what would you do?
What would you do if you were out with a client, they drank too much and started tearing down the company, saying bad things about our executives, products etc.
Why do you want to intern at Microsoft?
What would you bring to our team?
How would you suggest re-branding Vista?
What makes a good manager
How do you handle a disagreement between yourself and a high level stakeholder in another department
MS interviewers are ‘trained’ not to lead the interviewee by asking questions that reveal information – most of the questions tend to be a bit banal – “where have you succeeeded, failed, what did you learn?”
You have a list of red and blue objects. You have to sort them using swapping in order N time.
Given an inorder and preorder traversal of a binary tree, reassemble the tree.
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.
Why have you stayed in your current position?
What would you want to do if you were not in the technology field? Why did you not pursue this profession?
How do you measure ROI in a job?
The most difficult questions were the technical ones. They consisted of programming questions to “how would you test this” questions.
What is your most chanllenge
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