I had an on-campus interview where the interviewer asked questions about a couple of things on my resume, as well as the most challenging technical problem I've faced and how I solved it. I was not asked any coding questions.

Two months went by before I heard back from Microsoft. I was led to believe that I had been rejected since several candidates had received an invitation to interview on-site in Redmond, WA. Eventually, my recruiter told me that I had been selected to interview for an SDET role, although he didn't specify the team (this is only communicated on the day of the interview). From this point on, it took another month-and-a-half or so to schedule the on-site interview in Redmond.

From this point on, however, the process was smooth sailing, and I received an email asking to confirm travel details. The trip and itinerary were booked swiftly. On the day of the interview, I met with the on-site recruiter, who told me which team I would be interviewing for and answered some soft/HR-type questions. I was given some suggestions and advice from the recruiter on how to approach the technical portion of the interview.

I had a day's worth of on-site interviews with mostly technical questions. We went a bit overtime, although I found that each interviewer was friendly and very proud of the work they were doing. They were also more than happy to answer any questions I had, as well as give feedback on my performance. The format of the interviews was a brief introduction, followed by two technical questions. The first was generally on how to test a particular piece of software, and the second was usually a whiteboard coding question.

After five interviews, I met the Hiring Manager, who I feel was evaluating my 'fit' for the organization. The questions here were a mixture of technical and non-technical ones.

ADVICE:

• Although it has probably been stated elsewhere, I cannot stress the importance of knowing the following things:

  • Data Structures (Stacks, Queues, Trees, Heaps, Linked Lists, Hash Tables, etc.) as well as how the various operations on those data structures work.
  • Being able to reason Time Complexity in code that you've written or seen (especially operations on data structures).
  • Coding on a whiteboard or without a debugger.

• I would also suggest going on the internet and getting some practice with coding problems (TopCoder, CodeKata, HackerRank, Leetcode, etc.).

Given a binary tree, how would you set the keys/values of all the nodes and their child pointers to null? No language restriction.

Do it iteratively in O(N) time with O(1) space complexity, where N is the number of nodes in the tree.

Other Details:

• The tree is a regular binary tree and does not have the BST property.
• It is not guaranteed to be balanced.
• You may do whatever you want to the tree; however, you must ensure that all the nodes in the tree and their left/right pointers are set to null.