Microsoft Interview Questions

GalacticInterviewer - "I first clarified what he needed for the leaderboard meaning did he need a gaming leaderboard system, a stock market leaderboard system where the trades placed would be ranked in terms of values or a coding platform leaderboard where the users are ranked as per the points earned by solving the problem? He answered that he wanted a multipurpose leaderboard system He was specifically interested in the design of the api part Explained him that assuming we had a flask api there would be a get re"See full answer

Harsh W. - "Me: That's an interesting challenge. I would like to get some clarifications before jumping into potential solutions. Are we talking about the global search market irrespective of device or are we talking about a specific geography / device type? Interviewer: Lets go ahead with all possible searches. Me: Ok. Is there a specific reason we want to capture a significant market share from Google (e.g. higher search revenue, cross-selling MSFT services etc.) and are there any timelines we should k"See full answer

Stanley Y. - "First of all, stack and heap memory are abstraction on top of the hardware by the compiler. The hardware is not aware of stack and heap memory. There is only a single piece of memory that a program has access to. The compiler creates the concepts of stack and heap memory to run the programs efficiently. Programs use stack memory to store local variables and a few important register values such as frame pointer and return address for program counter. This makes it easier for the compiler to gene"See full answer

Takashi M. - "Me: First of all, I’d like to have some clarification about this project. Me: What is the current product line design of the vending machine? Is this a traditional vending machine? Customers pay money cash or credit card, and select products and receive the product. Interviewer: Yes, that is the correct assumption. We make vending machines for canned drinks and bottled drinks. Another product line is for selling small packaged snacks. Me: What is the goal of this project? Is"See full answer

Michael F. - "As an interviewer, I have asked this question to candidates in the past. Here are the major topics I am looking for in an interview The candidate should understand that there are ways of measuring the loss of a particular clustering. For example, we can take the average distance of each point to it's cluster center. The candidate should understand that this loss will always decrease as the number of clusters increases. For that reason, we can't just pick the value of K that minimizes the l"See full answer

Rahul J. - "Clarifying questions Key value proposition of the product: targeted search engine for kids to search the internet Target users: kids below 18 years of age Target geography: USA Form factor: web app Target market Kids (largely school students) are now increasingly using the internet for educational purposes to perform assignments, collaborate on projects etc. A search engine is a core need to access the internet for this audience and is needed quite frequently - almost every time a"See full answer

Rohan S. - "I got to play with a VR for the first time a few weeks ago at my friend’s house and I loved it, so this is a really fun question. Clarifying Questions Is this something we are looking to create Microsoft or are we a startup company etc? > Education can refer to elementary, high school, university, or even self-learning (e.g. Udemy). Is there a specific area we want to focus on? << What do y"See full answer

An D. - "First find the node that we need to delete. After it's found, think about ways to keep the tree BST after deleting the node. a. If there's no left or right subtree, we found the leaf. Delete this node without any further traversing. b. If it's not a leaf node, what node we can use from the subtree that can replace the delete node and still maintain the BST property? We can either replace the delete node with the minimum from the right subtree (if right exists) or we can replace the delete"See full answer

Alfredo M. - "The question refers to a very specific event: "step into the back for a few minutes, return and see a lot of people waiting"... I might try to clarify goals and scenario: Before I stepped back, there were no ppl waiting? If so, we might be talking about a very specific, even uncommon scenario, in which optimizations for the complete serving system in the long term might not be needed. Maybe they even arrived all together and this is expected behavior. Are people waiting for something specif"See full answer

Ranj A. - "In the Transformer architecture, the decoder differs from the encoder primarily in its additional mechanisms designed to handle autoregressive sequence generation. Here's a breakdown of the key differences: Self-Attention Mechanism: Encoder: The encoder has a standard self-attention mechanism that allows each token to attend to all other tokens in the input sequence. Decoder: The decoder has two types of self-attention. The first is the same as in the encoder, but the second is mas"See full answer

Vikas K. - "During a trip to Japan, I encountered a significant language barrier that influenced how I communicated with others. As I didn't speak Japanese fluently, I had to rely on basic phrases and non-verbal communication to interact with locals. This experience made me realize the importance of understanding cultural diversity. Despite the language barrier, I found that people were patient and understanding. They appreciated my efforts to communicate in their language, even if it was limited. This expe"See full answer

Alfredo M. - "First, I'd like to ask some clarifying questions and try to narrow down the scope of this question. Among them I would like to ask: Are we looking to optimize for a specific goal or metric? Eg: we want more users/queries or are we looking to increase revenue? Are we testing over a specific aspect of Bing? EG: UI, search quality results, recommendation engine, etc. Duration and size of the test. Available resources or constraints (teams, technology, budget) Now, to ass"See full answer

Joel A. - "Clarify: User experience improvements or revenue based improvements for the company? (Assumed UX) Can it be hardware or must it be software? (assumed I have the choice) Position: My favorite product is Airbnb. It's an app that let's people list their home for short term rental and then let's guests book those homes (or rooms) to stay in. It's used primarily for vacations but people all over the world now use it for business or even longer term stays. It's idea was pretty revolutionary a"See full answer

Vijay S. - "Clarification questions - Assumption: Blind person - Generally aware about what an ATM machine is and how it works. Markets - US market and think about global expansion later Regulatory, Financial companies approval - We have agreement from the regulators and financial companies about the merits and we don’t see any kind of concerns from these companies Goal - Part of the company's social initiatives - Positive word of mouth - increase customer base Users - **Blind users with no other disabi"See full answer

Anonymous Wombat - "Was the statement very similar to the leetcode or was it changed and only the main idea remained?"See full answer

Prabhav G. - "Assumptions and Clarification! What kind of blind person are we talking about ? Are they partially blind? Color Blind? Can Detect Light ? Can See blurry Images? Is the Blind person an adult, elderly or a teenager? Do they have any additional disabilities? Where will this Iron be used? At home? or perhaps one for travel? Do we have any limitation of resources? Assumptions- We are talking about a Complete Blind person who cannot see anything at all i.e Zero ability to se"See full answer

Piyush D. - "Honestly, In addition to having the right expertise and skills required for this job, I am really looking forward to being part of this organisation’s journey. I am really confident that I will really exceed your expectations in achieving both mine and the company’s goals. I have worked with different teams in different capacities, managed a team of engineers successfully from very early part of my career and that has made me a very easy person to work with. I get things done easily. I am passio"See full answer