Microsoft SWE 2 Onsite Interview Experience and Questions

Microsoft Hiring Drive (October 31st)

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Round 1 Coding** Two Data Structures and Algorithms questions were asked: 1.

Max Consecutive Ones III: Find the maximum number of consecutive 1s in a b

Microsoft Hiring Drive (October 31st)

**

Round 1 Coding** Two Data Structures and Algorithms questions were asked: 1.

Max Consecutive Ones III: Find the maximum number of consecutive 1s in a binary array if you can flip at most K 0s. 2.

Rotting Oranges: Determine the minimum time required to rot all fresh oranges in a grid, given that rotten oranges affect adjacent fresh ones every minute.

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Round 2 Coding**

Problem: Word Ladder.

Variation: In addition to finding the length of the shortest transformation sequence, the solution required printing one of the specific shortest sequences.

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Round 3 High-Level Design (HLD)**

Problem Statement: Design a feature for a music streaming service (similar to Spotify) to return the Top K songs played in the last 7 days. The interviewer specifically requested to include only components relevant to this feature.

Proposed Solution: *

Logic: Implemented a sliding window approach covering a 7-day period. * Store (song : count) data for each specific day. * As the window slides, add data for the new day and remove data from the day exiting the window. * Aggregate the data from the current window and process it using a Min-Heap of size K to identify the top songs. * This calculation is performed daily. *

Architecture Components: *

Infrastructure: API Gateway and Load Balancer. *

Services: Playback Server and a dedicated TopK Song Server. *

Storage: Database for song metadata and a Cache to store the play counts. *

Concurrency: Proposed using Redis Redlock to handle concurrent data updates.

Result:

Rejected following the HLD round.