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Group Anagrams at Microsoft — Interview Guide

How to approach Group Anagrams in a Microsoft interview: the optimal approach, what Microsoft interviewers look for, and company-specific tips.

Updated 2026-09MediumArrays & Hashing

The problem at Microsoft

Given an array of strings, group the anagrams together. An anagram group contains strings that are rearrangements of the same letters.

Microsoft uses this problem to assess growth mindset, collaborative, product-minded. Expect Microsoft-specific follow-ups that tie the solution back to production reasoning and the company's engineering bar.

Key concepts

Sorting each string gives a canonical key — O(k log k) per string.
A 26-character count tuple is a key in O(k) per string and is faster for long strings.
Both produce the same groups; the count key wins when strings are long.

Approach

import collections
def group_anagrams(strs):
    groups = collections.defaultdict(list)
    for s in strs:
        key = [0] * 26
        for c in s:
            key[ord(c) - 97] += 1
        groups[tuple(key)].append(s)
    return list(groups.values())

What Microsoft looks for

Growth mindset — learn from feedback and failure.
Collaboration — how you work across teams.
Customer and product focus — especially for product teams.
Solid CS fundamentals in coding and design.

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