Background - Masters from Tier1
Position - SE2 in top fintech company
YOE ~ 5 years

My Joy of happiness is getting interview call from Microsoft.
I was lucky to get call from both Microsoft Hyderabad and Bangalore

Onsite (virtual)
The interviews were conducted through the teams app. There were 4 rounds, each rounds almost got stretched to 1.5 hours

Most rounds had the following structure
~10 minutes - Behavioural
30-40 minutes - Coding + System Design
5-10 minutes - Questions for the interviewers. 

I can not share exact questions (Due to NDA), I have briefed them below.
Round#1 -
1. Simple LC Medium problem
2. Implement custom stack operations with push pop getMax getMin and popMid operation.
Interviewer later on twisted to problem into a complex problem and asked to solve it within next 5 mins. I think he deliberately wants to put me in pressurized situation to check my poise.
NAILED IT !!!

Round#2 -
1. Stack and Queue based question,
2. Tree Traversal based question
Again in this round, interviewer started with a base question, then build a series of questions on my answer.
NAILED IT !!!

Round#3 - [2 interviewers, Manager + Principal Engineer]

1. Past projects, deep dive ~ 30-40 minutes
2. System Design : WhatsApp authentication service [post design questions on key gen service,  flow diagram, timeout settings, data to be stored]
   I could not be more lucky, I was very confident in these whole round.
   ROCK'D IT !!!

Round#4 - [Senior Manager + Director ]

1. Deep Dive in performance Tuning of 2-3 past projects, discussions on Memory Leaks, Fragmentations, Multithreading, thread and resource management
   Uh-Oh !!!
   Unfortunately this round did not went very well, it had a system design question which was much more focused on thread processing.

I was exhausted by end of all interviews. My first interview started at 10 am and last interview ended at 7pm.
I was not satisfied with my performance in the last interview, so I decided to take a break on that day, learn from my mistakes and move on to next interview from the next morning.

Surprisingly, I got call from recruiter after an hour, he told that feedback is positive and you might hear from us in next couple of days.
Voila .. 1 week later, we were talking numbers.

Microsoft was my 10th interview in 2020.
My 2 cents to all the grinders out there -
Don't lose hope. It is easy to feel low and quitting the journey. But keep going. It is OK to feel low, embrace those emotions, take a few relax, rejuvenate days and come back to the arena. But make sure you solve at least 1 question per day.

P.S - I had to stop my job hunting journey due to health reasons and decided to join Microsoft.

LC Preparation till date - 425
Easy - 132
Medium - 248
Hard - 45