I applied online. I interviewed at Microsoft (Moscow, Moskva)
Interview
The process from sending the CV to the first interview took ~1 month. HRs had not responded for a long time. Then they arranged a phone interview with a senior developer from MS.
The interview was quite brief. He asked a couple of general questions like 'what is your software development background?' 'what are you working on now?'. Then we came directly to programming. There was only one problem: determine whether two strings are anagrams, i.e. contain the same letters.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Anagram detection. This algorithm's complexity can be reduced to O(n) by counting frequencies of every letter from two words and comparing them. I didn't come to that - instead I suggested a O(n log n) algorithm. It seems that was my fault.
It started with a 90-minute online assessment, followed by a technical phone screen with one engineer. The OA covered two medium-to-hard algorithm problems. For coding practice, I mainly rely on "LeetCode" to cover different topics. For company-specific interview preparation, I use "Hack2Hire", "LeetCode Discuss", and "1Point3Acres" to find any recent original questions. All of them are helpful platforms. The phone screen included one coding problem and some discussion around edge cases and time complexity.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Given a list of meeting time intervals, determine if a person could attend all meetings.
I applied online. The process took 1 week. I interviewed at Microsoft in Dec 2024
Interview
I was invited to a technical interview with Microsoft. The interviewer started with a general question: “What happens when you type google.com into your browser?” They asked a few follow-up questions related to that.
After that, they gave me a LeetCode algorithmic question, which was at a hard level. The problem was “Integer to English Words.”
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
1. What happens when you type google.com into your browser?
2. “Integer to English Words” – LeetCode algorithmic question
Three tech interviews + one hiring manager VO, most of questions are medium to hard leetcode questions. Ask some questions about techniques you written on the resume. But I think they care more about the match of the research and the job.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Tell me about the recommendation System you made for the work.
