Microsoft Software Developer interview questions

Round 1: It was a coding test which was held on CoCubes platform. 3 problems were given of varying marks: 2 marks: Given a string, find the first non-repeating character in it. For example, if the input string is “GeeksforGeeks”, then output should be ‘f’ and if input string is “GeeksQuiz”, then output should be ‘G’. This question was really easy to solve. Just simple implementation by using HashMap. 3 marks: Given a number, find the next palindrome larger than the number.Number was in String format. 5 marks: Given a singly linked list L0 -> L1 -> … -> Ln-1 -> Ln. Rearrange the nodes in the list so that the new formed list is : L0 -> Ln -> L1 -> Ln-1 -> L2 -> Ln-2 … Round 2 (Fly Round) : It was a pen and paper round. We need to solve the problem given to us on paper using Brute force as well as optimised approach. Q1. Given an array A[] of n numbers and another number x, determines whether or not there exist two elements in S whose sum is exactly x. Q2. The problem was to count all the possible paths from top left to bottom right of a m X n matrix with the constraints that from each cell you can either move only to right or Tips to crack this round: 1. Write well. Good handwriting matters to some extent. 2. Write the approach first and comment your code well. 3. At last write the time complexity and space complexity of the solution you wrote. All these really matters to an extent. 12 students were selected for the next round.