Phone call after applying.

Quick behavioral questions. Final question about 9 marbles, 1 heavier than all of them; find it using a 2-plate scale.

Received an email inviting me to fly out a month later. They set you up with a nice hotel in Bellevue, WA, and a rental car (if chosen). They pay for all your meals with an allowance of $75 a day or thereabouts.

On the day of the interview, they picked candidates up together in a party bus in front of the hotel. The bus had flashing strobe lights and neon green lighting at 7 AM. It was funny, if anything, but quite silly.

Throughout the whole experience, I never got told what I was interviewing for. They finally told us, and I was COMPLETELY uninterested in the team. That spiked my confidence down. I could have saved Microsoft $2,000+ on my trip if they had told me that upfront; I would have declined. Even after talking to all the interviewers, it clearly wasn't for me. So, how they got that impression from my resume, I'm not sure.

But that doesn't mean I didn't give it my best shot. Four 45-minute interviews with 5-minute breaks in between for food/drink. The atmosphere was wonderful; it was a great confidence booster. I felt awesome and confident I could nail the position anyway. After the first interviewer, I was told that mobility was a nice perk of the job without even asking. The interviewers started with questions about me, my past projects, strengths/weaknesses, followed by technical questions, and left maybe a minute or two for questions about them.

Technical questions were:

• Implement a circular array with a k-step elimination.
• Return the sub-array with a maximum continuous sum.
• Check for a tic-tac-toe winner given a matrix.
• Without knowing the size of an array, find an element.

This was the strongest interview I think I've ever had. Yet, I was told two workdays after leaving that they passed on me. I think I fell short on the last interview, with the element in the array, because I didn't realize try-catch was an option to use in an interview. My previous work experience does not use try-catch loops; they're a big no-no, as they're super slow. I've always used assertions. I got halfway through the question before that, and the interviewer was unhelpful in pointing out options to solve the problem. He was also a very off-putting interviewer and didn't seem organized.

The other three interviewers I had – we laughed, we discussed interesting topics like AI/machine learning. I nailed the technical questions from start to finish with room for testing and optimization; it was a great time. So my best guess is that last guy talked badly about me, and I was told you need all four to basically love you to get in. A waste of time and a waste of money on their part.

Summary: Super easy interviews with a laid-back atmosphere and great hospitality, but you're left in the dark with what you're interviewing for until the day of, and all it takes is one interviewer to be stubborn and unreasonable.

Without knowing the size of an assumed sorted array, find a provided element.