# C++ Interview with a Microsoft engineer

#### Watch someone solve the k nearest points problem in an interview with a Microsoft engineer and see the feedback their interviewer left them. Explore this problem and others in our library of interview replays.

[C++ interview with a Microsoft engineer: K closest points](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5FKYwt95rGE)

### Interview Summary

**Problem type**  
K nearest points

**Interview question**  
1) Find the K nearest points to a vertex.  
2) Change your solution under the condition that you have an input file of size 500 Petabytes.

### Interview Feedback

**Feedback about Pseudo Gyroscope (the interviewee)**  
Advance this person to the next round?  
No  
How were their technical skills?  
3/4  
How was their problem solving ability?  
2/4  
What about their communication ability?  
3/4

> It was a pleasure interviewing with you. Unfortunately I would have said no to passing you for an offer (although I would have advanced you to onsite). For the most part your technical ability is pretty good, you were able to write out clean functioning code...

**Feedback about Indelible Raven (the interviewer)**  
Would you want to work with this person?  
Yes  
How excited would you be to work with them?  
2/4  
How good were the questions?  
3/4  
How helpful was your interviewer in guiding you to the solution(s)?  
3/4

> Please let me know the resource for design prep in case you remember it. Thanks!

### Interview Transcript

**Pseudo Gyroscope:** Hello? Can you hear me? Hello?  
**Indelible Raven:** Can you hear me?  
**Pseudo Gyroscope:** Hi yes, I can hear you now...  
**Indelible Raven:** ... So I guess kind of how I do it, I work in Microsoft and formerly Google...  
**Pseudo Gyroscope:** Yes.  
**Indelible Raven:** What's your primary language?  
**Pseudo Gyroscope:** C++  
...  
**Pseudo Gyroscope:** ... So I'm returning a vector of neighbors that are within... oh wait... oh, you're saying the K closest neighbors?  
**Indelible Raven:** Yes.  
...  
**Indelible Raven:** What if I gave you ten billion points and K is equal to three?  
...  
**Indelible Raven:** ... So I would look at if... so I want to read like a... not sure how to do this but look for a way to read parts of a file...  
...  
**Indelible Raven:** ... I'll just tell you alright? ...  
**Pseudo Gyroscope:** Ok, what was the O(1) time?  
**Indelible Raven:** That, you could do some sort of pre calculation to almost return... or return probably with some sort of accuracy threshold ...

> Overall, you did okay. I would not have passed you, but you weren't bad either. That's kind of my feedback, do you have any questions?

**Pseudo Gyroscope:** So yeah, definitely the... I'm just really starting to look into design stuff...

**Indelible Raven:** ... So you should take a look at a Google's Flume framework for MapReduces...

**Pseudo Gyroscope:** Ok.