Essential Microsoft Coding Questions To Ace Your Next Interview

Getting inside Microsoft is a dream of many Software developers because of:

• Company’s excellent track record
• Ideal compensation packages
• Flexible work balance
• Comprehensive opportunities

And much more!

Undoubtedly the infamous software giant is among the largest and the most influential companies in the world.

Though, cracking the coding interview at Microsoft is no less than an uphill task. One of the biggest reasons behind this would be the uncertainty and tough level of Microsoft coding questions.

If you are on the spree or looking for a guide which will help you align your Microsoft interview preparation in the right direction, this blog post is just the perfect for you!

Read on to know about some of the essential Microsoft coding questions to excel at your interview:

Microsoft Hiring Process

Let’s first get a glimpse of the company’s hiring process to know about the nature of the interview and the whole process. Generally, the timeline for the whole interview is in between one to two months.

• Pre Screening Round: The recruiter will first contact the candidates via an email in order to schedule the phone screen round. They will look at your resume and ask some behavioural questions. Then you will have to solve a given coding question in 30 minutes.
• Phone Interview Round: Within two weeks, the recruiter will call you for the phone screen round. The senior developer will take your interview to assess your technical skills.
• On-site or the virtual interview: After the phone interview, you can participate in 4 to 5 rounds of in-person or the virtual interview. Each round will be of one hour.
• Final interview: This round would be conducted by the AS-AP who will be having the final say in case of your hiring
• HR Interview: Your manager will decide if you are culturally fit for the company or not in the HR round.

Commonly Asked Microsoft Coding Questions

To help you a bit further, we have compiled some of the commonly asked Microsoft coding questions. These questions are mostly asked from the candidates to judge their coding skills. Moreover, these questions also commonly appear in the coding tests.

Let’s have a look at these coding questions:

Find all the missing numbers in the given array.

You are given the array of positive numbers which ranges from 0 till n. Here, all numbers are present from 1 till n except the number x. You need to find the x. You can assume in this case that the input array given to you is unsorted.

Determine whether the sum of any two integers are equal to the given value.

An array of integers is given to you with a value. You have to determine if any two integers in the array are equal to the sum of its given value or not. Return true if any sum exists. Otherwise, return false if it doesn’t exist.

How to set the rows and columns as zeroes?

A two-dimensional array is given to you. If any of the elements within them turns out to be zero, you can make a whole new row or column as zero. You can get the output with the matrix to make the first and the second row as zero to get the expected results.

How can you copy the linked list with the help of an arbitrary pointer?

A linked list with the nodes and two pointers are given to you. The first one would be the next pointer and the second one would be the arbitrary_pointer. This pointer can point towards any node in your linked list.

Here, in this case the deep copy will be on the operations of the linked list which will not affect your copied list.

How to connect all the siblings?

In this case, you need to connect the given sibling pointer with the next node according to its same level. Here, the last node in the level will point towards the first node of the next level in a tree.

Check the symmetry of a binary tree

A binary tree is given to you. You have to write the program to return the value true if that binary tree would be regarded as the mirror image of itself. Return false if the value is not true.

The correct output in this case will come out to be true as the value in this case will be symmetrical. In this way, you can easily check the symmetry of a given binary tree.

About string segmentation

In this case, the dictionary of words with the large input string would be given to you. You need to find the order of the input string to show if it can be segmented into the given words of the dictionary or not.

Find the maximising single sell profit

The list of daily stock prices is given to you. Return all buy or sell prices which will maximise the buy or sell profit. If you are not able to make any profit, you can try to minimise your loss.

In a given matrix, identify the longest path

An n*n matrix with distinct numbers is present to you. You need to find the longest path that may start from any given cell in a way that the cell alongside the path will increase by the order 1. So that you can find the longest path.

Find the length of a longest subsequence

A one-dimensional array of integers with the array a of n length is given to you. You can easily find the longest subsequence which will increase before decreasing.

Find the missing numbers in a given array

An array of the positive numbers from 1 till n is given to you. All numbers from 1 till n are present except the number x. You need to find x.

Wrapping Up

Prepare for the most commonly asked Microsoft coding questions with the help of this guide, take part in coding tests and excel at your interview.

Begin your preparation journey today!