Found a job posting for what looked like a really fun team at MS, I applied, chat with HM on next steps.

Since I signed an NDA I will not give specifics but hopefully this is still helpful to some folks.

I was given a take home assignment, which I had to submit and have reviewed, and then also given a coding screen. The coding screen was a LC medium type question I had about 30 minutes to complete.

Next step was to set up an onsite. The onsite consisted of four rounds, with a heavy emphasis on behavioral as well as coding. All three rounds with coding it seems like the expectation was around 20 miutes or less for coding and 35 minutes for behavioural.

The first round I breezed through the coding round, got a bit stuck on a small edge case after ten minutes, and the interviewer seemed to want to help me along and get through it. I'm extremely confident I was already at the 'pass' stage so he just wanted to get to behavioral, it also seemed to go very well. Super friendly casual chat and I only had warm vibes. This was not a LC question but similar to a LC medium graph problem.

Second round was HM's boss, this was design (related to APIs, compilers, etc). I've never felt like I impressed someone so much in an interview. I'd bet anything I got an 11/10 here. Comments like "wow that is a great idea, very nice". "oh no one's ever suggested that before, that's fantastic, I like it!".

Third round more coding, I breeze through it again. I hadn't seen it before but I later found a very similar question on the Blind 75 (but reworded, same alog though). It was a LC medium variation.

Fourth round is a disaster. The guy asks me to do some design and I start thinking it is system design and after I ramble for ten minutes he says "ok let's get to coding" and gives me a problem that doesn't seem too hard at first. I solve it, but suboptimally. He points it out, and I just get stuck. I can tell he's frustrated. I've only been coding for maybe fifteen minutes but he seems annoyed... I finally spend five more minutes confused then it comes to me and I tell him the answer and he says "we don't have time for you to code it though" and go into behavioral. He seems nice enough but I keep remembering how annoyed he was I took too long for what shouldn't have been a hard problem.

Later on I searched around on LC and found a variation of the problem, it was a medium level problem.

So, five days later I get a rejection email. Fucking sucks to crush three rounds and just one bad round kills it.

I called my recruiter asking if they had any feedback and he said the notes say "good coding, good behavioral...I dunno there was probably just someone a little better, all this is great feedback". He also said there isn't a bounce back period so I can apply to other teeams right away.

As for advice to others, the questions were not hard (I was just stupid in one round) but they wanted code FAST. Every question was a variation of common LC questions, but they were all worded differently so it really helped to know the fundamental algorithms and data structures.