I interviewed for an SDE II position with the Microsoft Academic Graph team.

I will say outright that it was an absolutely terrible interview experience for me.

The team asked me some specific questions about how I would add features to Microsoft Academic Graph. After this, during the second hour, they asked me an architecture question, which I feel I did very well on. Then, they asked me to write the code for a specific data structure, conceptually going through the characteristics of this particular data structure with me. After a while, they told me to write it in pseudocode.

I felt like I did pretty well up until this point, though I had felt that I didn’t implement the data structure completely. (They later told me that I didn’t pass the interview because I didn’t write complete code in C++ for this data structure).

What bothered me about this interview process, however, was that during the lunch interview, my interviewer asked me a lot of very personal questions that were completely unrelated to the job. I told her about how I used to take care of children, and she told me that I should go back to doing that instead of being a Software Engineer.

Furthermore, during the lunch interview, the interviewer only consumed a single banana and threw the rest of her food away. I strongly felt that, due to the nature of the questions she was asking and her generally condescending attitude toward me, this was some sort of racist dig toward me (I am an underrepresented minority).

Going through this experience and watching her eat the banana while making chiding jokes about how I shouldn’t be a Software Engineer was completely humiliating, unprofessional, and made this interview ultimately a waste of my time. Because of this, I have a strongly negative impression of Microsoft as a company.

There was another interview after this, but it was with the same person, and I felt completely uncomfortable about the entire thing. After this, I was given a pencil as a “parting gift”.

If this was some kind of a joke, I am definitely not amused.

Out of CS graduates with Computer Science degrees, Microsoft tends to not hire women and underrepresented minorities, including women of color such as myself. Microsoft should do better, including hiring interviewers who are sensitive to their own bias and blind spots, and who definitely don’t openly make fun of people.

Furthermore, if they wanted me to implement the code, which was far more than 8 lines (the GeeksforGeeks.com implementation of this data structure in C++ is no less than 50 lines of code, for instance), then it would be good to specifically tell the candidate to implement that data structure in actual code, in order to guide them in the right direction as opposed to the wrong one, even if the requirements somehow cannot be made clear for specific reasons during the interview itself.

Q. Implement a KD tree in C++.