I applied online for a new grad position and was contacted for a phone interview shortly after. My phone interview was about 30 minutes long and consisted of no coding questions. There was one brain teaser about measuring water using a couple of buckets, and the most technical question I was asked was about the differences between C and C++.

From there, I was notified about 10 days later that I would be moving forward to final round interviews for an SDE position in Fargo, ND. I was told I would be hearing from a scheduler soon to set up my interview day. Ten days after that, the scheduler emailed me about setting up a day to come to Redmond to interview. Then she apologized, stating she had made a mistake and that I was actually interviewing in Fargo. I provided my availability and then heard nothing for about three weeks.

By this point, I had already had my onsite interview with Amazon (I applied to both companies at the same time). So, I emailed my scheduler to ask if any progress had been made. She said I had a tentative date and reemphasized three times that it was tentative. The date would be the Friday of the following week. She said she would contact me again when the date was closer.

Jump ahead one week to Monday. I received an offer from Amazon and still had not had a date confirmed with Microsoft. So, I emailed my scheduler to politely inform her that I did not wish to move forward. I got a response almost instantly saying she was "just able" to get my interview confirmed for the upcoming Friday, which gave me four days' notice, and asked if I still wanted to come out to Fargo. I replied again, saying I wasn't interested. Then I heard from my original recruiter, who was basically begging me not to pass on the opportunity to interview and consider Microsoft. She said if location was the issue, she could reschedule me ASAP for an interview in Redmond. So, I agreed to fly out to Seattle if they could get it scheduled within the timeframe that I needed to reply to Amazon.

The next email I got was from someone I had not been in contact with yet, saying, "I hope you're getting excited for your interviews, blah blah, safe travels!" I was confused. Was this person referring to my interview that had been confirmed for Fargo, or a new interview in Seattle? I responded, asking what was going on. She replied, "Disregard my email and work with your scheduler to get a date set." It was not until Wednesday evening that I was informed I was interviewing that same Friday in Seattle. I got a call from the travel department trying to set up last-minute flights and flew out the next night.

When I arrived for the onsite interview, I sat in a lobby with about 15 other candidates for about 40 minutes waiting for someone to come retrieve me to start my interview day. This someone turned out to be the same person who had emailed me earlier in the week to wish me safe travels before I had an interview confirmed. When we sat down to talk, we discussed the confusion, and I tried to put it all out of my mind so we could move forward. Then she says, "So, you're here to interview for an SDET position." Um, what? I was told SDE. There is a difference between the way you interview for a developer and a tester position.

She went to double-check and then confirmed that, yes, I was interviewing for a testing spot. She then tried to pitch the testing position to me and asked me to keep an open mind, while trying to convince me that the interviews are basically the same for either spot and that the job responsibilities overlap a lot. If you look at Microsoft's website where they have information for preparing for interviews, you can see there is quite a difference between the two types of interviews.

So, the rest of my day consisted of four interviews with testers. I feel that I answered their coding questions well (none of them seemed very hard), but I was clearly unprepared to answer so many testing questions. I wasted their time and my time making that trip to Seattle. I respect the four people I interviewed with and learned a lot about Microsoft's SDET role from them. I feel like a jerk for coming in without having done much prep in the testing arena.

At the end of the day, my interviewer said she figured out what had happened. Regardless of the reason, someone should have communicated to me that I was interviewing for test rather than dev BEFORE I showed up for the interview. She said that she had emailed and asked the interviewers to consider me for both SDE and SDET after the day had started. I don't know how many of them got the memo or how a testing team is supposed to say, "Yeah, give her an offer for some other team who has never met her." Either way, I was notified the following Monday that I was not going to receive an offer. Quelle surprise!

Half the questions were unexpected because I didn't anticipate an interview for an SDET position.