If your application passes technical screening, you meet for an informational with the hiring manager. If that goes well, you meet with some of the team on an ad hoc basis. If that goes well, you are asked back for a "gauntlet" style interview.

On the day of the second interview, you meet with the HR recruiter handling your application. They give you the tentative schedule for the day, including the first two interviewers. All other interviewers in the loop are included on an "as needed" basis, which means that after the first two, you're either asked to continue or asked to leave. Next interviewer, then another "as needed" or bye-bye. The 4th person you interview with will be your prospective manager's manager. If you make it that far, you're doing well. There's a 5th "as needed" person that will be your manager's manager's manager.

I made it to the 4th interviewer and was told that the 5th "as needed" person was booked solid and couldn't make it. This was a polite way of saying "we'll call you." The HR recruiter called me within the week to let me know that I was being marked as "hire for MS, no hire for the position," which means I'm not blackballed, just not going to get this specific job, so keep applying.

Interviewers don't always focus on what your role will be. The position I applied for was supposedly a "Service Engineering" role, but 2 of my 4 interviewers were senior dev leads asking me a bunch of dev-related questions.

• "Show me how you'd identify a problem with this service using C# or Powershell."
• Not just conceptual "well I'd do this, and this and this," but writing it out on a whiteboard in pseudo-code, how you would actually accomplish each task on systems you know next to nothing about and in environments with untold ambiguities.

Clarifying questions are a MUST.

My answers must not have been satisfactory, or perhaps required too much "guiding" (aka clarifying). It did not help that English was a second or third language for these two interviewers. When I gave puzzled looks because I had no clue what they just said, did they interpret that to mean I didn't understand the problem or didn't know how to solve it? These kinds of challenges will abound. Next time I will say clearly that I'm having a hard time with their accent (politely, of course).

Microsoft doesn't do the "if you were the size of a nickel and trapped in a blender...." type questions anymore, unless you're applying in a group you probably don't want to join anyway.

I'm rating my experience as negative, not because I didn't get the position, but because the two devs that interviewed me for a non-dev role were added ad hoc to the interview in lieu of two people who were scheduled to interview me but were out "sick" (my interview took place the Monday after Thanksgiving weekend).

Other than those factors (which I think tanked my chances significantly), it was positive overall.

If you were informed by a PM that you were responsible for building out an entirely new service, how would you build it out?