We helped another student to get an offer! This time, we shared the interview experience of Microsoft SDE The interviewer was very friendly and the experience was great. The overall process is pretty much the same as Tiktok, first BQ, then Coding + follow up, I've organized the questions and shared them with you, let's take a look together.
Microsoft SDE VO Round 1
BQ
- Tell me about your most challenging project and how you handled it.
- What did you do when you faced an obstacle that seemed insurmountable?
- How do you convince others to adopt your technical idea?
The participant's BQ answer before the interview was only a statement without the support of technical details. Under our guidance, the participant optimized the BQ answer, upgrading it from a simple statement of "what I did" to a story of "how I think, make decisions, and influence other people", and used the STAR model to focus on the main line of "challenge-action-impact" during the interview, and made clear the decision-making thinking (why choose option A instead of B). In the interview, they used the STAR model, grasped the focus of the question, followed the main line of "Challenge-Action-Impact", identified the point of conflict, clarified their decision-making thinking (why they chose Option A instead of Option B), and quantified their personal contribution.
Coding: the longest substring that does not contain repeated characters
Idea: use a sliding window. Use a hash table to record the character's latest subscript. When a duplicate character is encountered, move the left boundary of the window to the next position of the last occurrence of the duplicate character. At the same time update the maximum window length is completed.
Follow up:
How can your algorithm be optimized if the input string is so long that it cannot all be stored in memory?
The participant initially replied "You can use the idea of partitioning. Cut the string into several segments, find the longest non-repeating substring for each segment, and then merge the results." Later, after our reminder and prompting, the participant added: "The sliding window algorithm only needs to maintain two core parts at any given moment: the left and right pointers to the current window, and a hash table that records the latest subscripts of the characters in the window."
Microsoft SDE VO Round 2
BQ
- Tell me about a time you had a disagreement with a teammate or manager. How did you resolve it?
- Describe a situation where you received critical feedback. How did you handle it and what changes did you make?
- Tell me about a time you received a customer complaint. How did you respond and what was the outcome?
Coding
The requirement of the topic is to design an algorithm that serializes a binary tree into a string and can deserialize that string into the original tree structure.
Idea: first think about which traversal method, such as preorder traversal, relatively simple and direct, and then serialization, the value of the nodes into a string, encountered empty nodes with a special symbol (such as "#") that each value separated by a comma, and finally deserialization, the string is split, recursive recursion in the same order! Reconstruct the binary tree, encounter special symbols will know that the node is empty.
Follow up:
What if the tree node values themselves also contain the delimiters or special symbols you use?
Pass the whole thing! For the Coding section of Microsoft SDE VO, pay attention to the traversal of hash tables, double pointers and binary trees, and practice more high-frequency questions to improve your proficiency.
Microsoft SDE VO 3rd round
The topic is based on a network of friendships represented as an array of strings.
Follow up:
How to efficiently implement such query operations in a distributed database environment
Idea: first store the relationship as distributed key-value pairs: user ID -> list of direct friend IDs. Then check the secondary relationship: get the list of "friends of friends" in parallel, merge and de-duplicate. Finally, check whether the target ID is in the result set, and optimize the performance by parallel query.
Microsoft SDE VO Round 4
The topic is to design a caching system that supports multiple elimination strategies.
Idea: Use the policy model to decouple the caching logic from the elimination algorithm. The bottom layer uses a hash table to store data and a bidirectional linked table to maintain the access order. Provide a unified EvictionPolicy interface, and each policy implements its own elimination logic. Cache initialization injected into the policy object , put/get call the policy method , support for dynamic switching policy and thread-safe .
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