Microsoft Interview

back to blogging after a long pause. I happened to get a chance to interview with Microsoft at my campus. I thought I did really well but surprisingly I got rejected :( waa, :( waa. I'll describe my experiences. As such I have not signed any confidentiality agreements, so I believe its okay to post here.

Interviewer: what is palindrome?

Chiku: any string which is same as when reversed!

Interviewer: what is stack?

Chiku: LIFO (with an example!)

Interviewer: If i give you $1000 and ask you to buy one electronic gadget, what would you buy?

Chiku: Amazon Kindle

Interviewer: Why?

Chiku: I already have a good configuration laptop and high end mobile, So having kindle helps me read papers, books, novels and it keeps me updated with news. Its flexible and easier to carry and read anytime!

Interviewer: What is the most technically challenging problem you have faced and how did you solve it?

Chiku: (said blah blah about last year company work!)

Interviewer: List down the languages you know in the order of how much comfortable you are with.

Chiku: C,Java, C++, Python and Haskell

Interviewer: have you worked on SQL? databases?

Chiku: yes I did! PostgreSQL

Interviewer: Write down a program in C to find out the first non repeating character in a given string.

Chiku: asked several good questions like, what is the domain of characters that make the string?, is small and capital letter should be treated same or not?, etc)

Chiku: described the algorithm, keep track of frequencies of characters and their first indices as I walk down the string. Finally walk over the frequency table and check which has frrequency 1 and least index. wrote c program.

Interviewer: how would you test this code?

Chiku: test cases like, passing null pointer, non-null terminated string, passing strings that have non-letters, empty string etc...

Russ: any questions?

Chiku: what would I be working on If I would be hired?

Interviewer: you could be working in any department. said blah blah about microsoft...d same story!

Chiku: What is the project you are working on?

Interviewer: he said blah blah on virtualization,

Chiku: (since I know about that stuff, I asked some questions and talked about it).

Chiku: I already have an internship offer from XYZ company

Interviewer: We will keep it in mind and will try to process yours quickly.

I wrote c program which is identical to this one but not complete because of lack of time.

Lets try it again, until I succeed. :-)