
Google vs. Microsoft: A tale of two interviews - Garbage
http://www.itworld.com/it-managementstrategy/281266/google-vs-microsoft-tale-two-interviews
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Arun2009
I too have had interviews at both these companies for software development
positions. Totally different experiences.

With Microsoft (for their Vancouver office, 2007) - the interviews were pretty
technical, but not severely challenging. I was unhappy with my job at the
time, had prepared very well over a period of months for coding-type problems,
and was "in shape". The toughest question they asked was, 1) how to serialize
a binary tree, 2) how would you compress the representation given that the
tree was not full. They were immediately impressed when I asked then whether
they intended me to write the deserialization code as well - the thought had
apparently never struck the other interviewees. They asked me to code it up,
and I did.

With Google (Bangalore, 2011) - I was way out of shape for this, having not
programmed in a while. The phone interview required me to write two programs,
one of which was to check whether a sudoku puzzle configuration was in the
solved state, and the other to generate all subsets of a given set that had a
particular cardinality. I managed to code the programs relatively easily. I
was selected for the onsite interview, where they asked me mainly questions on
dynamic programming. There was also a question on counting frequencies of
letters in a massive corpus of text, and on how I'd implement a certain
feature displayed in the search results that Google returns. The outcome: they
didn't say outright that I failed the interview, but that there has been some
change on their side, blah blah and would I be willing to wait for some more
time? Obviously I had not done well enough to clear the bar.

Overall I got the impression that Google's version was more centered on
competitive programming-type problems than Microsoft's, which was more
software engineering-centric. MS definitely much easier than Google.

