The interview process began with a telephone screening by HR, followed by a technical Skype video interview. This covered my understanding of .Net, my views on open source, and the security policies of large organizations.

This presented an ideal opportunity for Microsoft to filter out candidates who did not recently use Azure and products like Dynamics CRM with the required depth. However, I was advanced to the face-to-face stage, which felt like a further waste of my time.

An on-site interview takes place during a specific "recruitment" day, where they process many candidates quickly. I was asked to prepare a presentation on Microsoft products, with about three days to prepare if my life could spare it.

I was left waiting in reception far longer than I would ever consider leaving an interviewing candidate at my company. But what would I know? I'm a dev manager for a small outfit, not a corporate.

The “logistics” section advised preparing a 25-minute “talk” followed by Q&A, and bringing my own laptop (I'm not sure why they naturally assume everyone has a laptop). I recommend ignoring this section. I wasted an entire Saturday preparing a slide-based talk for the exact time specified and practiced with my partner to get the timing perfect.

Also, ignore the instruction not to introduce yourself. They likely hadn't read that part and might have taken a disliking to you. I suspect that did not go well for me.

On the day, they treated the presentation more like a discussion, with two individuals firing cynical, "knowing" questions at me every time I spoke. Their excuse was "role-playing as a dev team they might deal with." However, this derailed the presentation completely. Stopping to answer questions or go back to previous slides they wanted to critique consumed all the allocated time.

It felt like lazy interviewing and was quite disrespectful to candidates who had literally just arrived at Microsoft. My impression was that it's a very corporate environment, and it wouldn't be a pleasant place to work.

They delighted in interrupting me if I even mentioned anything they didn't feel was relevant to their vague memory of the spec (which they admitted they neither had nor had read recently).

I was unhappy to have taken a day off and traveled to Microsoft, only to be treated in a manner I considered unprofessional. I wasted time preparing a hands-on demonstration using Azure, which they didn't want to see due to time constraints. I had little control over this.

The questions were quite cynical, and there was some muttering and laughing at my slides, followed by criticism. This would not be a good interview for someone unable to infer these hidden expectations from the logistics section of an interview preparation document. For example, I am quite capable of hiring someone with autism, but Microsoft would not be, in my humble opinion.

As I had to give the presentation first, that left a bad taste in my mouth. They explained this was normal, as their customers are often unpleasant. I've worked with dev teams worldwide, and we all have challenging customers, but only a corporate mentality would expect to use that as an excuse for a confusing, ambiguous interview technique.

The later technical interview was good, and the individuals conducting it were professional. However, I was completely fazed by the presentation debacle and couldn't concentrate. Expect the standard corporate whiteboard session and practice communicating architecture visually. I enjoyed the business interview too.

Following the presentation experience, I had no interest in working for Microsoft and won't be recommending it to any developers on my teams now or in the future.

The feedback I received was that I appeared nervous during my presentation and lost eye contact "at one point" during the business interview. Therefore, make sure you maintain eye contact with those individuals until the very end.

Present Microsoft message queue products and choose the most appropriate.