I applied online. The process took 2 months. I interviewed at Microsoft (Atlanta, GA) in Mar 2022
Interview
Speaking to the interview specifically: It was a standard FAANG style interview. 1 pre-screen coding session online followed by 4 rounds, each with 1-2 behavioral questions followed by a technical question.
Each person i interviewed with was knowledgeable and friendly.
Its the recruiting process/post interview process that is atrocious.
After the interview rounds the email i received made it sound like i did well and they were just team matching at that point, but that was 2 months ago from the time of writing.
Excerpt from said email:
"you were an overall [Section Redacted] hire so we are just working out the details to find a team within [Section Redacted] that will best suite your experience and skillsets."
I received communication from the recruiter that someone wanted me on their team roughly a month after the interview rounds, but when the recruiter and I spoke he thought the hiring manager and I previously met. When i told him that was not the case he seemed confused and then cut the meeting. Attempts to follow up were not answered, and the technical sourcer also stopped answering.
Personally i think i would've rather been ghosted from the beginning instead of having the potential for a team dangled in front of me, it was a pretty disheartening experience.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Leetcode style questions, trending more toward easy/medium level.
HR screening, one technical interview with the hiring manager then three interview loop which covered two system design and one dsa round.
System design was intensive and challenging.
It took them 5 weeks to come back with an offer. Background check was completed in a week, got joining date after 3 days.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Design a system for a startup company that let users post various types of content and get a unique url which can be shared with others to access the content
Started with a recruiter phone call and a 30 minute phone call with the hiring manager to negotiate a remote role since the job was based in Seattle and the manager agreed. Following up with five rounds of virtual on site. Four of them are coding/design. One of them is behavioral mostly leetcode medium level questions which I finished and I was able to do all the follow up and answer the design and time complexity questions correctly after the interview got ghosted for a whole month and got an automatic rejection email.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Leet code medium level questions. DFS, BFS, sliding windows and greedy algorithm. Follow up, asking some design questions and the time complexity of the code.
