Before the MS interview
Most of the Chinese tech companies would like to kick off their graduate recruitment in July or August, which means June and July is the best time to prepare for the coming job seeking. However, as I was in Australia and expected to graduate in Dec, I need to prepare my dissertation(18k+ words) from March to November. Also, I selected a winter subject starting from early July. These gave me almost no time to prepare for the online coding test and interview. As you guys could imagine, I applied almost all big companies you can name(including PDD :(, btw they gave me three chances for coding test) but got nothing in the end. Only 5 companies gave me opportunities for an interview (thank Mi, Netease, Shopee, Ctrip, POIZON and SANGFOR), and I got only one chance for a second-round interview (Shopee Singapore).
As I have earned an offer from HUAWEI in Dec 2019 (expired at 31/12/2020), I basically stopped trying since October and devoted all to the final presentation and report.
(P.S. most of my subjects are about AI/ML and my research project is about ML, so at the beginning, most of my applications are ML/Algorithm Engineer. Tbh I may not be qualified to be an algorithm engineer or at least I did not really prepare for these jobs. It might be a very important reason why I got nothing during this time.)

After I finished the thesis in Nov, I had nothing to do but waited for my flight back to China in early Dec. During this time and the 14-day isolation afterwards, I applied several jobs which were still available in Nov/Dec. This time I applied both algorithm engineers and software development engineer (including MS).

After applying 
I applied  in early Dec, and I received the interview invitation email in mid-Dec. There were only about four days left before the interview since I received this email. There were two things that surprised me. One is that MS did not have an online code test, which is really rare in big IT companies. Another is the famous MS "parallel interview", i.e. they arrange two consecutive interviews in this invitation. MS will combine your performance in both interviews and then decide if you are shortlisted.
I had nothing to do back then and the package of the HUAWEI offer signed in late 2019 was really not competitive in 2020(or I should say 2021?). So I did take time to prepare for it - at least I read several blogs ;-).

First-round interview
Some guys may divide it into two rounds, but I prefer to see it as a whole because even you give an awful performance in the first one you still have the chance for the second. Your recruiter will arrange two consecutive interviews in one day, and each takes one hour.

In the first one, I was asked to give a short self-introduction(either in English or in Chinese). After that, he gave me two coding questions.
No.1 Return the top k large numbers in an array. One of the best answers is the quick select algorithm. My answer was sorting and selecting. Then he asked me the time complexity of this solution and the implementation one of the acceptable sorting algorithms.
No.2 Give the Chinese representation of a number.

In the second one, I was asked to give a brief introduction to a project I did before, and the interviewer asked some details about it (15min). After that, there were a few questions about linked lists and arrays, dynamic arrays and neural networks (15min). Finally, there was a coding question: calculate the ‘Qi’ of a point on a Go board (dfs).

{...to be continued}