This was for Microsoft Teams, their Slack-like team chat product. HR called and scheduled an interview at their office for three days later. I arrived on time and was asked to wait in a meeting room booked for interviews.

The first interview was with a woman. I cannot describe how horrible the experience was with this arrogant individual. She had a grilling attitude. Throughout the interview, her sole focus was finding ways to discredit me.

One of the questions she asked was related to website performance improvements. One suggestion I offered was bundling CSS/JS assets. She responded by asking why I would bundle CSS files for the entire site. I clarified that I never suggested bundling everything. I explained that bundling requires a strategic approach, not simply bundling all CSS for the entire site together. However, she was not receptive to listening.

Another question involved infinite scroll, where I mentioned debouncing requests. She seemed to have no understanding of what debouncing is. I explained that with continuous scrolling, when the user pauses scrolling for a short period, like 50 milliseconds, we trigger an API request. Her reply was that I wanted the user to take a coffee break and return. I was shocked to hear this. By this point, I was sufficiently frustrated and realized Microsoft was not the right place for front-end engineers. Their interviewees apparently lacked a basic understanding of debounce and throttle concepts.

The discussion then moved to Redux stores. She asked me about the flow in Redux and to design a store. I created an EventEmitter class with subscribers that emits an event upon state change. I explained that this is how it actually works, but she seemed unable to comprehend it.

Next, she asked me to write a class for Actions and Reducers. I was taken aback. Actions are plain JavaScript objects, and reducers are simply normal functions that take the state and action to transform the state accordingly. However, she did not understand this and still insisted on a class implementation for Actions and Reducers.

This interview was the worst experience I have ever had. It seemed like the interviewer was hired from a women-specific hiring drive.

The second interview was satisfactory. The interviewer asked me to code a plugin for list virtualization and assisted me throughout the process. We had a productive discussion and concluded the interview.

After some time, while waiting in the room, I received a call from HR stating I could leave for the day and they would update me. The HR did not even come to escort me out, despite being present in the office, which was small. I had to find my own way out. Such unprofessional people.

Regardless, I learned that Microsoft is definitively not the right place for JavaScript/Front-End developers.

Advice to Microsoft: Provide some training to your interviewers. And teach some manners to your HR.

UI Performance

Implement a class-based interface for Actions and Reducers in Redux.

List virtualization