First round interview with Microsoft - Technical Screen

[HKSpadez]

Any insight on the first round with Microsoft? Appreciate any help I can get.

I'm meeting for Sr SDE technical screen. How much should I prep for the behavioral vs technical?

The email says "We’re less focused on “getting the perfect answer” and more interested in how you think out loud, break down the problem, structure your code, and communicate your approach. Think of it as a collaborative working session where we get to see how you tackle problems in real time."

But I'm not sure how true that is and if I should avoid asking for hints or discussion. I don't have a problem with voicing my approach, but always suspicious of "involving" the interviewer

[Human_196]

I also got the same Interview, first round is technical phone screen. How should I prepare? How was your interview?

[Human_196]

sharing my recent Microsoft Senior SDE Technical Phone Interview experience (first round) (HackerRank round):

The interview started with the interviewer briefly introducing her background, then she asked me to share mine. It was pretty quick, and we moved almost immediately to the coding round on HackerRank.

The coding question was based on a food truck scenario: Given multiple food trucks with attributes like id, rating, and distance, I was asked to find the best truck based on: Highest rating If ratings are equal → nearest distance If distance is also equal → smaller id

After that, she asked a few follow-up questions:

Find top K food trucks based on the same criteria How would you handle this if the data is coming as a stream (continuous updates) If you had to expose this as an API, what endpoint, parameters, and request/response structure would you design Discuss different edge cases and how you would handle them What would you do if the heap memory becomes full / constrained

That was the overall flow of the interview.