Microsoft

Microsoft came to our campus for the SWE Intern role, and after clearing the OA, I got shortlisted for the interviews. The OA had two coding questions. I was reasonably comfortable with both, so I went into the interview rounds feeling fairly confident. The first technical round started normally with my introduction and a quick discussion about my projects. Then the interviewer moved straight to DSA. Question 1:** “How would you detect a cycle in a linked list?” I explained the hash-set approach first and then moved to Floyd’s slow-fast pointer method. The interviewer asked me to code the optimized solution and explain why it worked. After that, I got a DP question. I could identify the general idea, but I spent too much time trying to arrive at the optimized recurrence. A similar Microsoft India intern report mentions cycle detection followed by a DP problem. There were also some CS fundamentals—OOP concepts, OS and DBMS. These weren't extremely deep, but I realized I hadn't revised them properly before the interview. The second round was again heavily DSA-focused. I got a matrix/grid-based problem and was asked to first explain the brute-force approach and then optimize it. The interviewer also kept asking me to dry-run my solution with different edge cases. Recent campus reports describe a similar format, with one DSA problem plus CS fundamentals in each technical round. I came out of the interview thinking it was a close one, but eventually I received the rejection. I wasn't too disappointed because the interview showed me exactly where I needed to improve—especially DP, CS fundamentals and explaining solutions more confidently under pressure.