Microsoft Software Engineer Internship interview questions

Applied online, got an email saying that Microsoft would like to interview me as they were coming to my University’s campus in a week. The On-Campus Interview was a 30 minute interview with a manager from the Office 365 team, the interview consisted of personality questions at first, then some Computer Science “Trivia” asking about basic concepts such as object oriented programming.T0then we moved onto a whiteboard technical question where we proceeded to spend most of the time on the question but never moved onto writing code on the whiteboard just showing examples and talking out loud what some solutions to the problem could be as well as the space and time complexities that would arise from the solutions. As we began to run out of time more “Trivia” was asked, this time about data structures, then questions for the interviewer and that was the end. Received an email 4 days later saying I had advanced to the second round in Redmond, WA. The On-Site interview consisted of 4 x 45 minute interviews, one on one with various people from the Azure Cloud team. Each interview had similar structure to the on-campus one: Personality question for the first 5 minutes, then a technical question for the majority, then optional questions for the interviewer at the end. Each of the on-Site interviewers started off the conversation by introducing themselves and talking about what their position on their respective team was. 3 people from Azure Storage division, one Engineering manager, two normal engineers. The fourth interviewer was an engineer from the Azure Health Division, helping to maintain the backbone of updates to the platform itself. 2 out of the 4 white boarding questions consisted of using Binary Trees with the third question being an Array-based question and the fourth question being a task scheduling question. Once a basic answer was given for each of the questions (with or without written code on the board), the interviewer would proceed to ask about drawbacks to the solution, ask if efficiency could be improved in time or space complexity, then they began modifying the original question to be more restrictive on what could and couldn’t be done (e.g. now solve the problem using O (1) space complexity) As we would leave the interview room, the interviewer would either take a picture of the code on the board, or erase the board as we left the room. Oddities about my personal experience: In my first interview of the day, once the question was asked and we proceeded to make examples of the question, I was struggling with coming up with a pattern to begin formulating an answer, so the interviewer proceed to make more test cases, however during the process both I and the interviewer became confused multiple times at finding a “solution” to the test cases, miscommunication for understanding each other occurred many times and we never moved onto the coding of the solution before time was up. All 4 interviewers were monotonic in their feedback during the coding question, providing few visual or auditory responses whether I was doing a good job or not while presenting my answers. Each of the interviewers presented interest in my personal background however and asked multiple questions for additional details while explaining personal questions before having to move on. Although asked about, none of the interviewers seemed to note or care about data validation for their respective question asked.

Just had my first interview from Microsoft. I felt pretty good and the problem was not that hard. First I send my resume via their jobs page and latter this year heard from them. I also helped that the recruiter came to the campus.