80 Cool Interview Question Which Microsoft Ask ?
80+ Cool Microsoft Interview Questions
The Microsoft interview is
a job interview technique used by
Microsoft
to assess possible future Microsoft employees. It is significant because
Microsoft’s model was pioneering and later picked up and developed by other
companies. Initially based on
Bill Gates
obsession with puzzles, many of the puzzles presented during interviews
started off being Fermi problems or sometimes logic problems and have
eventually transitioned over the years into questions relevant to programming.
Some examples of questions that the recruiter will keep in mind or ask a
candidate include:
-
If a bear walks one mile
south, turns left and walks one mile to the east and then turns left again and
walks one mile north and arrives at its original position, what is the color
of the bear.
-
Given a rectangular cake
with a rectangular piece removed of any size or orientation, how would you cut
the remainder of the cake into two equal halves with one straight cut of a
knife?
-
There are 3 baskets. one of
them have apples, one has oranges only and the other has mixture of apples and
oranges. The labels on their baskets always lie. (i.e. if the label says
oranges, you are sure that it doesn’t have oranges only,it could be a mixture)
The task is to pick one basket and pick only one fruit from it and then
correctly label all the three baskets.
-
You have 8 balls. One of
them is defective and weighs less than others. You have a balance to measure
balls against each other. In 2 weighings how do you find the defective one?
-
Why is a manhole cover
round?
-
How many cars are there in
the USA?
-
You’ve got someone working
for you for seven days and a gold bar to pay them. The gold bar is segmented
into seven connected pieces. You must give them a piece of gold at the end of
every day. If you are only allowed to make two breaks in the gold bar, how do
you pay your worker?
-
One train leaves Los
Angeles at 15mph 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?
-
You have two jars, 50 red
marbles and 50 blue marbles. A jar will be picked at random, and then a marble
will be picked from the jar. Placing all of the marbles in the jars, how can
you maximize the chances of a red marble being picked? What are the exact odds
of getting a red marble using your scheme?
-
Imagine you are standing in
front of a mirror, facing it. Raise your left hand. Raise your right hand.
Look at your reflection. When you raise your left hand your reflection raises
what appears to be his right hand. But when you tilt your head up, your
reflection does too, and does not appear to tilt his/her head down. Why is it
that the mirror appears to reverse left and right, but not up and down?
-
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?
-
If you had an infinite
supply of water and a 5 quart and 3 quart pail, how would you measure exactly
4 quarts?
-
You have a bucket of jelly
beans. Some are red, some are blue, and some green. With your eyes closed,
pick out 2 of a like color. How many do you have to grab to be sure you have 2
of the same?
-
Which way should the key
turn in a car door to unlock it?
-
If you could remove any of
the 50 states, which state would it be and why?
-
There are four
dogs/ants/people at four corners of a square of unit distance. At the same
instant all of them start running with unit speed towards the person on their
clockwise direction and will always run towards that target. How long does it
take for them to meet and where?
-
How would you deal with
changes being made a week or so before the ship date?
-
How would you deal with a
bug that no one wants to fix? Both the SDE and his lead have said they won’t
fix it?
-
Write a function that
counts the number of primes in the range [1-N]. Write the test cases for this
function?
-
Write a function that
inserts an integer into a linked list in ascending order. Write the test cases
for this function?
-
Test the save dialog in
Notepad?
-
Write the InStr function.
Write the test cases for this function?
-
Write a function that will
return the number of days in a month (no using System.DateTime)?
-
Why do you want to work for
Microsoft?
-
Write the test cases for a
vending machine?
-
You are in a building, and
you want to know what the temperature is outside. How do you do it?
-
I am a venture capitalist
providing you with money for a remote-control start up firm. Design a remote
control that will make me rich?
-
How many Microsoft
engineers does it take to screw in a light bulb?
-
If you were to move the UC
Berkeley campus into the San Francisco business district, what would you do?
-
How would you test a new
elevator that will be placed into a hospital, but you don’t have access to the
hospital?
-
Suppose that I have a
closet with a base area of 4ft by 8 ft, and a height of 10ft, and that the
closet is completely filled with quarters. Now I take out that closetful of
quarters and stack them atop each other, one by one. Will the resulting stack
be higher, lower, or about the same height as the Empire State Building?
-
How would you design a
coffee-machine for an automobile?
-
How would you go about
building a keyboard for 1-handed users?
-
If you had a clock with
lots of moving mechanical parts, you took it apart piece by piece without
keeping track of the method of how it was disassembled, then you put it back
together and discovered that 3 important parts were not included; how would
you go about reassembling the clock?
-
Why is it that when you
turn on the hot water in any hotel, for example, the hot water comes pouring
out almost instantaneously?
-
You have been assigned to
design Bill Gates bathroom. Naturally, cost is not a consideration. You may
not speak to Bill?
-
Tell me the courses you
liked and why did you like them?
-
Give an instance in your
life in which you were faced with a problem and you tackled it successfully?
-
What is your ideal working
environment?
-
Why do you think you are
smart?
-
Do you want to know any
thing about the company?
-
How long do you want to
stay in USA and why?
-
What is your geographical
preference?
-
What are your expectations
from the job?
-
Design a cellphone for a
blind person?
-
Design a music system for a
car. What are the features? Draw a picture?
-
Design a GPS navigation
unit for a hiker?
-
Design a communication
device for Canadian park rangers?
-
Design a remote control for
an automatic window-blind system?
-
Design TV Remote Control
with Two Buttons?
-
Design a coffee maker that
will be used by astronauts?
-
Design an alarm clock for a
blind person?
-
Design a search function?
-
Design a website for a
library?
-
Design an ATM for children?
-
What method would you use
to look up a word in a dictionary?
-
What are examples of poorly
designed software?
-
Design an instant messaging
system?
-
I am your grandmother.
Describe what MATLAB is to me?
-
How would you explain what
a database is to a 5-year-old?
-
How would you explain
computer networking to a kindergarten kid?
-
What is your favourite
software, and how would you improve it?
-
Write code for an
electronic messaging board. What happens when a user logs on?
-
Develop an algorithm for
selecting objects in Visio?
-
Tell me about a time when
you made a decision and later found out that it was incorrect. What did you do
to resolve the issue?
-
Suppose you are one week
away from the product shipping date and discover a bug in your software. What
do you do?
-
You have a linked list and
don’t know how long it is; how do you find the middle of it?
-
How would you test a
keyboard?
-
How would you test a pen?
-
Write code for finding a
duplicate in an array?
-
Write code that returns the
length of a string without using any built-in functions?
-
Reverse a Singly Linked
List with and without using Recursion?
-
Determine if a Binary
Search Tree is well formed?
-
Reverse every word in a
String (abc def becomes cba fed)?
-
Write a function that
returns the angle between the hour and the minute hands of a clock, given
input of the time?
-
Write a function that takes
a string consisting of numeral characters and returns all possible alpha
character strings of same length as input that correspond to the keypad of a
typical telephone?
-
Imagine you have a closet
full of shirts. It’s very hard to find a shirt. So what can you do to organize
your shirts for easy retrieval?
-
How would you test a
program that takes in two points and outputs the distance between the two
points?
-
Test the Windows scroll
bar?
-
Switch every pair of words
in a string (“ab cd ef gh” becomes “cd ab gh ef”)?
-
Write the function for
strstr function (finding a substring inside a string)?
-
Reverse the order of words
in a string (“ab cd ef gh” becomes “gh ef cd ab”)?
-
Write the function for
string comparison. How would you test it?
-
Write a function to zero
all duplicate values in an integer array. How would you test it?
-
Write a function that
compares two strings and returns a third string containing only the letters
that appear in both?
