Microsoft Interview Experience -2024
I sent a cold email to a manager at Microsoft, and fortunately, he accepted and scheduled an interview with me.
Interview Format:
- First 35 minutes: Experience-based and resume-level questions
- Next 15 minutes: Technical questions
- Last 10 minutes: One coding question
Manager Round:
He started with one unexpected question: “How did you get my email?” I told him about my cold mail, and I think he liked my honesty and moved on to the interview.
General Questions:
Can you tell us about yourself and your professional background?
I introduced myself as a software engineer ……..
What interests you about this position and our company?
Some sweet talk …..
What are your greatest professional strengths and weaknesses?
Some honesty …..
Can you describe a challenging situation at work and how you handled it?
I described a scenario from my previous org ….
System Design & On-call Debugging (Main):
Scenario: You’re on-call and facing a critical issue where one service is calling another service but getting a request timeout. How do you debug it?
I had to first elaborate on my solution and then design the low-level design (LLD) as well. The scenario included details like no other engineers being available to help, and I was provided with all the logs and had basic knowledge of the codebase.
My Approach:
- Check Logs
- Service Health: Verify the health and status of the receiving service (e.g., CPU, memory usage, uptime).
- Network Issues: Check for any network issues that might be causing the timeout, such as latency or packet loss.
Detailed Debugging:
- Metrics and Monitoring: Use monitoring tools to analyze the metrics of the services. Look for any unusual spikes in response time or errors.
- Dependency Analysis: Check if the receiving service has dependencies that might be causing delays (e.g., database performance, external API calls).
Result: Rejected after a week
Reason: He wasn’t satisfied with my approach. I’m not sure what exactly he was looking for, as I feel there is no right or wrong answer in such scenarios. I kept emphasizing the Dependency Analysis approach, but he seemed to want something else. Time was ticking, and I quickly gave a basic LLD as well.
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