I applied through an employee referral. The process took 4 weeks. I interviewed at Microsoft in Jun 2023
Interview
Got referred by an engineering manager there, so my first interview was with a staff engineer. This was the worst interview experience I've ever had in my 10+ year career working at 7 companies and doing lots of interviews in between. The interview is based on these silly leetcode brainteaser kind of questions that is designed to make candidates fail if they didn't specifically study for these kinds of questions and were lucky enough to have a chance to see a question that they've seen before where they can memorize the algorithm and the answer, instead of any actual real life software engineering skills.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
My first question was very specific to Java/C# where my main language was with JavaScript, I was asked about to implement threadpooling in a language of choice which is very java specific where JavaScript is a single threaded language so it didnt make any sense. The second question was the leetcode question I was asked this leet code question https://leetcode.com/problems/rotate-image/ , rotating a 2D matrix clockwise, good luck figuring out how to solve it in your brain let alone writing it in code.
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.
