Real, anonymized candidate journeys from recent (2025) Microsoft SDE loops in India — round by round, including what was asked, how the candidate approached it, and the outcome.
One complete journey, start to finish
Online Assessment
It started with an email from the recruiter with a link to the online test, two hours to finish it, no live person watching. First question was a medium binary-search problem — I solved it in about 20 minutes and moved on. Second one was harder, a mix of DP and graph traversal, and it took me almost an hour with two false starts before the right recurrence clicked. I submitted with about 15 minutes still on the clock and didn't hear back for almost two weeks, which felt longer than it probably was.
Round 1 — DSA + LLD
This round was split in half. First half: a stack-based optimization problem, and I talked through my approach before coding, which the interviewer seemed to want — he kept saying "keep going" whenever I paused to think out loud. Second half: an LLD prompt where he specifically wanted a Factory pattern implementation, with an emphasis on keeping the created objects immutable. I built the classes step by step, explained why immutability mattered for thread safety, and he nodded along without interrupting much. Round ended right on time, 60 minutes exactly.
Round 2 — DSA
Three separate problems back to back in one hour, which meant no time to overthink any single one. First was a quick array/duplicate-removal warm-up. Then a parentheses-validation question, which I solved with a stack in under ten minutes. Last was a backtracking combinations problem where I had to generate all valid subsets under a constraint — I wrote the recursive skeleton first, then filled in the pruning condition once I traced through a small example by hand. Finished all three with about five minutes to spare.
Round 3 — System Design (75 min)
Longest round of the day, 75 minutes, and it needed both a high-level and a low-level diagram. I started by asking about scale — how many nodes, how large the working set was — before drawing anything. Then I sketched the high-level picture: router, shards, replication. She then asked me to zoom into one shard's internal LRU implementation, so I drew the linked-list-plus-hashmap structure and walked through get/put in O(1). Near the end she asked how I'd test this before shipping it, and I talked through unit tests for eviction order plus a chaos test for a node dying mid-request. She seemed satisfied with the breadth more than any single deep answer.
Round 4 — AA Round (30 min)
Shortest round, and it was the "as appropriate" round — part role discussion, part behavioral, with one small technical question dropped in: a quick cycle-detection follow-up related to something I'd mentioned from Round 2. I answered it in two sentences and moved on. Most of the 30 minutes was spent on why I wanted this specific team and a couple of behavioral questions about working with ambiguous requirements. The recruiter called four days later with an offer.
Key takeaway: Clear the Online Assessment quickly, be ready to discuss non-functional requirements (scalability, concurrency) in system design rounds, and treat the AA round's technical follow-up as seriously as the main interviews — it isn't purely a formality.
More real interview journeys
The first round of each journey below is shown in full; the rest of each candidate's journey — every remaining round, verbatim — is part of the Placement-Ready PYQ Kit.
Round 1 — OA (HackerRank)
Straightforward HackerRank test, two medium DSA problems, 90 minutes total. I finished both with time to spare and didn't think much more about it until the recruiter called back a week later to schedule the onsite loop.
🔒 4 more rounds — continue this journey in the full kit
Round 1 — OA (HackerRank)
First step, same as everyone else in the loop — two coding questions on HackerRank, no interviewer, just the clock. Both were on the easier side compared to what I'd practiced, so I finished with almost 40 minutes left over and used the extra time to re-test my edge cases before submitting.
🔒 4 more rounds — continue this journey in the full kit
Round 1 — OA (90 min, HackerRank)
Three problems in 90 minutes, which was tight. First was a Dijkstra's-algorithm question I'd drilled recently, so that one went fast. Second was a DFS problem on a grid, also familiar. Third was a combinatorics question involving modular arithmetic — that one took me the longest since I had to re-derive the modular inverse formula from scratch instead of remembering it outright. Submitted with about three minutes left on the clock.
🔒 4 more rounds — continue this journey in the full kit
Round 1 — OA (75 min)
This was my campus placement round, so the whole batch was taking the same test at the same time in the college lab. First question was a priority-queue problem I recognized from practice almost immediately. Second was trickier — a bit-manipulation question mixed with some combinatorics — and I spent a good chunk of the 75 minutes just working out the pattern on scratch paper before writing any code. Finished both right as time was called.
🔒 3 more rounds — continue this journey in the full kit
Round 1 — DSA (1 hr)
Both problems in this round were variations on regex-style pattern matching, which I hadn't expected two of in the same hour. First one was closer to the textbook version with '.' and '*' — I built the DP table and got it working. Second was a twist on it with an extra wildcard rule, and I had to adapt the same DP approach on the spot. Got there in the end, but it took longer than I wanted, and the interviewer's face didn't give away much either way.
🔒 2 more rounds — continue this journey in the full kit