Microsoft Offer with No Interviews
Feb 11
23 Comments
I have an interview with Azure ML next week. A hiring manager said he will offer me a role for Azure Redis without an interview loop (after completing a technical screen), but he said I have to decide before my interview with the ML team. Both roles would pay the same.
Iβd much prefer the ML role, but Iβm worried I might fail the interviews and get no offer at all.
Will I be burning bridges?
What would you do?
TC π―
comments
Pros: you will have less no. of Interviews. (Less headache)
Cons: both HM can see the result of the loop, so if you screw up in a round both can see it.
You can do the trade-off.
Desperation could mean that the team has a big budget that they afford hiring many members in the team. This could be a sign that the team has big growth potential which means easier promotion (especially important at Microsoft since the levels are granular).
At Microsoft, it is not good if the team already has members who have worked for many years. They would have domain knowledge and you will need many months to just catch up. If the team is starting a new project, it will be a great opportunity for you to become a manager in near future. New feature implementation always trumps other work at Microsoft.
Another factor is that teams with common tech stacks or leading tech tend to lose engineers often. Azure storage and Document DB for instance lost a lot to Google cloud a few years ago. These were hot and the recruiters at Google and Amazon knew what they were (especially Google). To my surprise, Bing also lost a lot because there are not many engineers working in search area. Many went to Google.
I think Redis would use common tech stacks and the engineers would be a target for poaching. Whereas ML teams tend to use their own stacks. They may look popular but the skills may not translate much in other companies. Azure ML provides infrastructure. That means there is little chance you will actually learn about ML. If you think about switching a job in the future, consider more on the infra level, not another ML work.