Status: 5 YoE
Position: L4
Date: Nov 2020

A recruiter reached out over LinkedIn. After the initial phone screen, the recruiter emailed several profiles that seemed like a good fit for me. I chose one and was offered to do an Online Assessment, followed by virtual onsite. I'm leaving questions out due to NDA.

Preparation:

• Because of WFH and family committments, I could not spend more time on practicing except for couple hours in evening and weekends.
• Spent time brushing up on basic data structures and practicing CTCI, Microsoft question list (very helpful)
• System design and OO design: I would practice this with a friend of mine over weekends. We picked a random topic and started discussing as if we are interviewing each other. I found this approach much more helpful than practicing by myself. Definitely helped with thinking out loud, and sharing thought processes.

Online Assessment: (90 minutes)

• 2 questions: 1 LC medium, 1 LC Hard. The questions were pretty straight forward and from the Microsoft OA question list.

Virtual Onsite:

• Round 1:
  • Beahviroral + Coding round with hiring manager. 1 question, not available on LC. I think because of nervousness I might have not performed well on this round.
• Round 2:
  • Behavioral + Coding round. LC medium question. We spent more time talking my current experience, which in turn didn't give us enough time to spend on the coding question. After intial discussions on how I would approach the question, I dived into coding it with the most optimum solution which was amusing to the interviewer. We spent some time discussing non-optimum solutions that they were expecting.
  • The fact that the optimum solution made them laugh, calmed my nerves, but I'm not sure if this was a red flag or not as they were expecting a non-optimum solution.
• Round 3:
  • Behavioral + System design. Design a system using one of Microsoft products but with heavy focus on requirement gathering and possible new features I could add/implement on to the product. The interviewer did not seem too interested in diving into technicalities.
  • No whiteboarding, screen sharing in this round. The interviewer seemed genuinely interested in having a conversational round.
• Round 4:
  • Behavioral. Spent entire time talking about experience from past couple years and products I've worked on, its impact, problems it is addressing. They just wanted to see if I'm a good fit for their team. The interviewer wanted to end the call early as they had enough data and ended the call cryptically - "as far as I'm concerned, I don't see any issues going forward"

Result:

Given how the 1st onsite round went, I had mixed feelings about this one. I received an automated rejection email after 5 days, and had to follow up with recruiter for few weeks to confirm the rejection.