Microsoft Senior HW Architect role (phone interview)
Anonymous User
575
(non-india thread)
Phone interview with Hiring manager for Sr. Architect Role. Job description seemed like a good fit with job description. 
Walked through my projects in great detail, with impact. 
Some really simple follow up questions. Interviewer asked some text book questions. 
I do not think person was strong on those concepts or atleast had not worked on.
  
Then asked me if I have worked on hardware. If they could not figure that out from the interview then 
I seriously do not know what to make of interviewer.   
Towards the end laundry list of questions- have I worked on GPUs, have I designed CPUs etc, 
have i worked on power etc. I walked through all that was possible in 1hr call. 
  
No clear description of the job role, until last 2 min. 
Then said software reliabilty is really important to them, sometimes changing HW config. etc. can help. 
LMAO.. Job desc was really inflated on portal with fancy words with 'no' mention of SW reliability. 

My understanding is team mostly did SRE non-sense, HW trouble-shooting, eval etc. for azure and job info was inflated to mislead. 
Person was just trolling for strong resumes or to perhaps get some knowledge share? 

Then said, they are busy interviewing several candidates for the role for next two weeks. 
If I had pending offers, deadlines- I should reach out.. WTF??  
  
A week before it, I had a conversation with another team at microsoft. 
The person said job description was kept very general cause they are working on super-confidental project.  
He asked me why I was interested in the role? lol..  description seemed to make sense that is why?? Then they ghosted completely. 
  
In both cases- job description was either inflated, misleading or concealed. 
From experience, msft does not make competitive offers for senior roles and mostly caves away. 
Classy hire stratery is offer low comp to multiple candidates so atleast one accepts.

Not a good place to interview at. Will not bother interviewing again.  
If you are a solid eng with some years of experience I d rather interview at apple or google, or some place like it.
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