Microsoft General Intern Interview Questions
& Process
Real candidates share what happened, how many rounds they had,
and how the experience turned out.
Based on 1,070 interview experiences · FREE TO READ
Candidate interview experiences
First-hand accounts from people who interviewed at Microsoft.
Microsoft
Intern
Intern Average Positive experience No offer 2 rounds About 2 months
Interview process
Technical screen Technical screen
Interview formats
Technical Coding
There were two 45-minute interviews. The first one focused on problem-solving: I introduced myself, they gave me a problem, and we talked through multiple ways to solve it. I coded up one solution, did a follow-up task, and then compared my implementation with a better alternative while talking about time and memory trade-offs. The second interview started with a short intro and a walkthrough of two of my projects and their flows. After that, the interviewer asked about how hash maps are implemented, some basic OS concepts, and databases.
Confirmed questions1 question
- You have n balls arranged in a line; ball i has weight w[i] and value v[i]. You can keep choosing either the leftmost or rightmost remaining ball, and stop whenever you want, but the total weight chosen must not go over W. What is the maximum total value you can obtain?
Microsoft
Summer Internship Program
Intern Average Neutral experience No offer 2 rounds
Interview process
Technical screen Technical screen
Interview formats
Technical
There were two rounds of interview where in first round i was asked 2 technical questions, first was similar but with a different problem statement, not straight forward to find the second highest salary in an array and second was to find all the unique numbers and shift them to the front. In the second round he talked about my projects and asked a graph question which i was not able to explain to him.
Confirmed questions1 question
- They asked about my projects and mainly focused on them
Microsoft
Explore Intern
Intern Average Positive experience Accept offer 2 rounds About 3 months
Interview process
Onsite
Interview formats
Behavioral Technical
Applied and then got moved straight to the final interview round. Both interviews were 45 minutes, about 10 minutes apart, and were a mix of behavioral questions plus one technical question at the end. For behaviorals, just be yourself and answer honestly, STAR method is preferred. For technicals, the interviewers were very understanding, just be sure to talk through your thought process and write plenty of comments.
Confirmed questions2 questions
- Can you describe a time when you disagreed with a team member on a project? How did you move past it?
- Lucky numbers and Substring Matching
Microsoft General Intern Interview Questions
Quoted word for word from Microsoft interview reports.
“We have a string of length N made only from the letter "a". Whenever there are two same adjacent letters (for example "aa"), they can be changed into a single letter which is the next one in the alphabet. For instance, "aa" becomes "b" and "e" would become "f", but "zz" cannot be changed anymore. Based on this rule, what should be returned?”
Read reports →“Given two sorted linked lists in ascending order, merge them into one single linked list that is also in ascending order.”
Read reports →“Implement a function to determine if two given strings are permutations of one another, meaning they contain the same characters just in a different order, like “abcd” and “dabc”.”
Read reports →“Find the number of digits in only the even numbers in the array and store the result in a new array.”
Read reports →“Given an array, return the number that shows up an odd number of times in the array.”
Read report →“Write a function that returns all prime numbers between 1 and n, where n is a given integer input.”
Read report →“You have n balls arranged in a line; ball i has weight w[i] and value v[i]. You can keep choosing either the leftmost or rightmost remaining ball, and stop whenever you want, but the total weight chosen must not go over W. What is the maximum total value you can obtain?”
Read report →“What do you think is the best data structure for storing a phone book with names and phone numbers?”
Read report →“Explain how you would tweak binary search to get the first occurrence of a target value in a sorted array, and describe how this method is different from the usual binary search.”
Read report →Formats, difficulty and experience
Across all 1,070 Microsoft interview reports.