Microsoft Software Engineer interview experience

In the first coding interview, I was asked a medium LeetCode-style binary search problem. The second round shifted to graphs, and that change in topic made it feel like they were testing whether I could adapt quickly.

Between the two interviews, the overall experience was pretty middle-of-the-road, but the core theme was still classical DSA. I noticed they cared about efficiency too—if I didn’t optimize, the later test cases could fail because of time limits. In the end, I didn’t get an offer, and it left me with the sense that the problems weren’t impossible, but the margin for suboptimal