Well, I was rejected, and not surprised, but somewhat upset about the whole process: I apply to a MSFT senior software engineer job posting that has a list of different teams under it, Azure/AI related but it listed different products/teams. A couple days later I get an email with a link to an OA, with a week time limit. I'm pretty busy so I wait until the day before the link expires and I do the OA, it's pretty simple. One LC medium that i had seen a while ago, and a couple other easy level questions (maybe mediums, but on the easy side). I complete it with time to spare. Still haven't talked to a recruiter to tell me what the whole process will look like, what the role is, etc. I get an email that I "passed" the OA, and I have two choices, to interview next week on a specific day with 4 hiring managers, or wait two months. I tell them I'll do the interviews, but kind of weird that it's all HM right? Round 1: I'm ghosted by the first interviewer. I sit in teams in silence. I call my recruiter (line doesn't work). I call my recruiting coordinator, no answer. I email them both. No response. (this is during their working hours). In between the 10 minute break I check LinkedIn, my recruiter announced that day he started a new job at PayPal! WTF. Round 2: Guy asks me questions for a bit, we have microsoft teams issues, we have to spend a few minutes figuring out sound....then he gives me a tree problem. I explain my algorithm, he says code it. I code it up, walk through a couple test cases, find a bug, show him "oops I forgot this I will fix it", I show him the fixed code. He then says "ok but now do this in linear time". WTF, I haven't seen this before. I realize he wants a DP solution but I've never seen this problem. I struggle for ten minutes to come up with a solution and he seems annoyed, and at this point I just bomb. He asks me time complexity and I say squared and he says "no it's exponential". We move into behavioral and he doesn't seem happy with any of my answers. Bombed this pretty hard. :( Some on me for panicking after failing to find the optimal solution, but damn this guy is asking tree based DP questions and expecting working code in 20 minutes? Round 3: System design, goes OK until the end he asks "what if someone is DOSing your system". I explain I'd filter bad traffic, cache similar messages to see, use queuing, he then says "ok but what if the traffic is indistinguishable from good traffic, no heuristics work for detecting it, and you cannot have any slow down of the system". I didn't have a good answer so please enlighten me blind. Round 4: Chat for a few minutes, asked a problem I haven't seen before. He says "we don't have a lot of time for coding, so it's OK if we don't get a complete working solution, let's just see how far we get" I can't tell if it's greedy or DP. I come up with a few test cases where greedy works, show him, then I come up with one that doesn't work with greedy. I start explaining how I'll recursively keep track of two pointers and use a cache ...............HE INTERRUPTS ME TO SAY "You need a hint, you're going to need to have a 2D array...i'ts called dynamic programming". I've rarely been confrontational with an interviewer before but I say "no wait. My solution is equivalent to yours". He seems unconvinced, and I just say "please can I just code my solution". I proceed to code faster and more perfect than I've ever coded in my life. I come up with a perfect working memoized recursive solution. He is dumbfounded and reads it for a few minutes He says "wow, I didn't know....you could do it recursive. let's see if you got the edge cases....yup....". From then on the rest of the interview it seemed to go really well, he seemed like he liked me a lot. Who knows if he marked me down for 'needing a hint'. Three weeks go by and I finally get the rejection email. *shrug* Never once talked to a recruiter, I don't even know what job I was rejected for. TL;DR Microsoft recruiters are terrible at times, and the interviewers are random and picky about weird things, I need to practice recognizing O notation/algorithmic complexity. #Microsoft #interview #swe
Lmao @ “Wow a DP problem can have a recursive solution too!”
I had a bad experience too. Not in terms of recruiter or the process In itself, but the level of ambiguity was something I’ve never seen in any other interviews
Did you get the feeling the interviewers wanted the solutions done exactly a certain way? It just felt like they weren't interested in seeing my problem solving capabilities, and instead just had a weird list of boxes to check...
True, only one round was LC and I spent some time as the interviewer was not familiar with Python. In the end I had a feeling I was penalized for using Booleans, although optimal space and time complexity
I wouldn’t work for a company that has a bad hiring process. Oops where I am. It seems your round 2 went bad. For round 3, you don’t know how well you did. Recently I realized that I was not good at System Design after having a couple of mocks and received feedback. Round 4 looks okay. I felt similar things from other companies. The head count is getting lesser with a small layoff. It’s tough these days
In general I am really good at System Design. I've done mock interviews on interviewing.io with system design and got great feedback. However, who knows, for round 3 definitely didn't jive with the interviewer like I have at other companies so I'm guessing at best a "meh" or "lean hire" kind of result. But, if I had 1 no hire, 1 maybe hire, and one strong hire I can see why they picked other folks. :(
the PayPal twist was brilliant
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Lmao @ "it's not squared it's exponential"
squared = n^2 vs 2^n, I think he was right.
Ah that makes more sense sorry!