I applied for a Software Engineer II role on the Microsoft career website on September 20, 2018. The Microsoft recruiter called me within an hour and informed me that I was shortlisted for Azure CPX, with the interview scheduled for September 22, 2018.

I asked for a couple of days' time, but her conversation was very generous and motivated me to attend the interview. She also suggested that in the worst case, I could reapply after 15 to 20 days for relevant openings.

There was an ambiguous situation regarding the interview time, as I received two different times. She actively resolved the issue.

The interview experience began with a warm team welcome. I sat in a room with other interviewees and was called for my interview a few minutes later.

First, I was asked to provide a production algorithm to check whether a given string is a palindrome, including its time and space complexity. I asked a few questions to clarify the inputs, such as whether the input would fit into memory and if our function should print or return a flag.

After the clarifications, I discussed the naive approach: initializing a new array of the string's length and then reversing the old string into the new array from index 0, followed by comparing the elements of both arrays. The interviewer asked me to optimize it, so I explained comparing the first and last indices and breaking the loop if they didn't match. I then traced the code with even and odd length strings. The problem was further extended to finding the longest palindrome within a string.

I asked for feedback a couple of times but haven't heard from her.

Check if a given string is a palindrome, including time and space complexities.

Find the longest palindrome in a string.