Microsoft SWE 2

Experience - 3 Years, Tier-1 College;
Current Company - Corporate Investment Bank, 20 Base;

Recruiter reached out to me via Linkedin, and asked me to apply through a career portal link. I got a link on the same weekend for a codility test. (Mid-April)

Round 1: Codility Assessment

Q1) https://algo.monster/problems/fair_indexes
Q2) Count number of balanced nodes, in a n-ary tree, balanced nodes are the ones where each child has same number of immediate children. So lets suppose a node x has children a, b, c, d, then node x will be balanced only if the number of immediated children that each of the node a, b, c and d have is same. (Answer: Recursively compute bottom-up DFS).

I would rate the round as medium, time limit was 70 minutes, and the challenging part is once a solution is submitted, you would neither be able to know whether your code passed all the test cases, nor will you be able to update your solution, so you have to be absolutely sure when submitting.

Verdict : I cleared this OA, and was invited for Teams interview.

Round 2: DSA + Minor Multi-threading Follow-up

Q1) Implement Queue using fixed size Array -> this was again on codility, and you are not allowed to run the code, the interviewer will just tell you whether the code has bugs or not, and would expect you to figure out. They would also want you to write down the test cases on which you would be testing your code.

Q2) Follow-up on Q1, since array has a fixed capacity and once the array is full we would not be able to insert more items into the queue, implement a logic where a thread would block the insert operation, until another threads pops from the queue, so that the first thread can insert into the queue. (Answer: You can use simple lock around the insert function, and an inner while loop to stay there till the queue is at full capacity). This was the approach that I came up with, which might be wrong, but the interviewer didnt raise much concern here.

Then we just went on discussing a bit about tech-stack and production grade applications where multi-threading is very important. (nothing technical just casual conversation).

Verdict:
Havent heard back from the recruiter since, nor is the career portal application status updated.

If anyone else has faced the same then let me know.

If any queries regarding the above then please share in comments, will try to address.

Thank you!