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Microsoft Interview Questions

Interviewing at Microsoft used to be different from Interviwing at other companines. But with the advent of new economy and Internet things have changed dramatically in past few years. More and more companies are adopting Microsoft Interviewing philosophy and hence their questions. Here is a typical set of Interview questions (submitted by - Andrew Smith) asked for an entry level Software Design Engineer(SDE) or Internship positions.

• You have 5 jars of pills. Each pill weighs 10 gram, except for contaminated pills contained in one jar, where each pill weighs 9 gm. Given a scale, how could you tell which jar had the contaminated pills in just one measurement?

• One train leaves Los Angeles at 15 MPH heading for New York. Another train leaves from New York at 20mph heading for Los Angeles on the same track. If a bird, flying at 25mph, leaves from Los Angeles at the same time as the train and flies back and forth between the two trains until they collide, how far will the bird have traveled?

• Imagine that you have 26 constants, labelled A through Z. Each constant is assigned a value in the following way: A = 1; the rest of the values equal their position in the alphabet (B corresponds to the second position so it equals 2, C = 3, etc.) raised to the power of the preceeding constant value. So, B = 2 ^ (A's value), or B = 2^1 = 2. C = 3^2 = 9. D = 4^9, etc., etc. Find the exact numerical value to the following equation:
  
       (X - A) * (X - B) * (X - C) * ... * (X - Y) * (X - Z)

• How would you find a cycle in a linked list? Try to do it in O(n) time. Try it using a constant amount of memory.

• Design a memory management scheme.

• Implement an algorithm to reverse a doubly linked list.

• A square picture is cut into 16 squares and they are shuffled. Write a program to rearrange the 16 squares to get th e original big square.

• Write C code to implement strtok() 'c' library function.

• The Web can be modeled as a directed graph. Come up with a graph traversal algorithm.Make the algorithm non-recursive an d breadth-first.

• How would you implement a hash table ? How do you deal with collisions.?

For more Microsoft type technical interview questions, browse throguh the Interview Question s and Answers area on this site( escpecially questions in Analytical and Algorithm sections). Some of the personal interview type questions generally asked by employers are listed under common interview questions.