Microsoft | SDE - 2 | YOE- 2

**Coding Round **
coding round with 2 easy / medium problems on codility in maybe 90 minutes, solved them in 30 minutes.

received call after 5 days for scheduling interviews

Round 1 (DSA Round)
question 1: (similar to this but quite easier) https://leetcode.com/problems/brace-expansion-ii/description/
question 2 : LC medium (don't remember the question exact) but wasn't that difficult

solved both problems along with running code

Round 2 : (LLD Round)
question 1: https://leetcode.com/problems/lfu-cache/
solved the problem
got call for scheduling 3rd round on the next day

Round 3: (HLD Round)
given a lot of servers and a lot of files, how will you read a file from these servers and store it in database and use find operations.
He was more focused on how things work on a single server rather than Caching, DB, making system Robust. While solving the problem, he even went into details of how compiler works.
Gave me a file with strings like:-

"12:00 21 June 2004 : 192.168.8.5 "
"192.175.4.6 message: Rahul 13:35 4 July 2007 4 GB Ram "

how will you parse the data and store it in which database. while discussing this, he wanted to know about how compiler works, what program will i write to parse this file and how compiler will behave. He wanted to know about grammar. I told him that i don't remember compiler design. After which he asked about searching part. I gave him solution of trie and indexing and implemented trie along with diagram, he seemed to be satisfied. Asked me whether i know big data analysis or not, to which i denied. He appreciated and praised me for trie understanding.

after 2 days I called recruiter and asked for feedback, se said i cleared the round and HM round will be scheduled. Got the HM round link after 3-4 days

Round 4 (Hiring Manager Round)
Problem: Design an application, where you need to book a time slot for a particular doctor.
Discussed about my approach, along with pseudo-code. stareted discussing on DB then concurrency.
discussed on multi-threading that there will be race condition, for which i wrote code of semaphore to which he asked me that there can still be multiple threads that can enter into critical section (which i already knew as i was saving it up for further discussion). then I wrote code for mutex. He appears to be satisfied and praised me quite a lot.

This round was the best, as gave answer to each and every question along with code. Was sure of positive review.

after 2 days i called recruited, she said that i got No Hire verdict in last round. Feedback was:- I didn't discussed on multi-threading and didn't write psuedo-code, which was had to believe as our discussion was only on multi-threading and wrote working code rather than pseudo code. Felt very sad for next 4-5 days, as i was expecting a lot from Microsoft.