The interview was at Swiftkey, which since acquisition is Microsoft Swiftkey. So, I guess this review makes sense here, since the hiring process and decision are also completely made by Microsoft.

At first, I thought this was some April Fool's joke when I received the rejection email from Microsoft Swiftkey. Not because I was expecting a positive reply, but because my words were twisted so much in the last round of the interview and then stated as a reason for rejection.

The reason was that I had stated that in the future I wanted to become a System/Solutions Architect. As per Microsoft, that is something that sales people do, not people who have worked as DevOps Engineers in the past. Also, because "Gluing/Using existing tools together with automation, to help Developers deliver solutions faster and better" is probably not something that DevOps Engineers do. I might have gotten the definition wrong.

About the process, there were 6 rounds in total.

• First, a phone call with HR.
• Second, a telephonic interview with the Hiring Manager.
• Then, 4 rounds of face-to-face interviews on-site on the same day, 3 of which would be technical.

The idea that would be sold to you by HR is that they conduct 4 rounds with 4 different interviewers so that Microsoft can receive an independent, unbiased opinion from all the interviewers. You may perform well in two and not so well in two, and that wouldn't impact the outcome that much if you did really, really well in 2 rounds.

HOWEVER, in reality, that is far, far from the truth. The outcome would be solely dependent upon how you perform in the last round, the one with someone from senior management (so keep an eye on the titles). Their main intention will be to make sure that you don't "leak" into Microsoft from Swiftkey somehow.

The senior management person will be interested in all your previous roles, most importantly why you left them. They would try to question you in various ways just to find out if you are lying or not.

Besides this, the other three rounds will be purely technical whiteboard algorithm questions. If you have interviewed for developer roles after university in the past, you would be better off. Typical questions come from books like '100 coding questions to crack and whiteboard interviews'. There will be no systems/architecture-based questions, because they are looking for a Developer, not a DevOps Engineer. It's just a badly advertised/described role.

I didn't know about any of this when I showed up for the interview, so I hope this helps out at least a few folks out there.

Where do you see yourself 5 years down the line?