Get ready for a looooong ride. The entire process from interview to offer took 3 months. I interviewed via a hiring event. My god, this has to be the most frustrating interview experience ever.

First step: an online assessment. It was fairly easy, but this is where the frustration started. It took over a week to get back to me with the results. I mean, I passed every test case, so why wasn't I automatically passed to the next round? After following up with the recruiter multiple times for a week, I finally received an email saying I was moving to the onsite stage.

Since this was a hiring event, the date was already set. However, I didn't get confirmed for the event until ONE DAY before. ONE DAY. I had to take a leap of faith and take time off for the interview, with the recruiter completely unresponsive. So unprofessional.

Onsite consisted of 4 interviews, 45 minutes each, with a 15-minute break in between. All were virtual via Teams. They had this kickoff call at 7:30 in the morning, and it was just a Teams meeting with all interviewees in the room. It was just awkward. No one knew what they were doing there. I left after 10 minutes. To this day, I have no clue what that was supposed to be, and why I had to get up and be ready by 7:30 AM. Mind you, the timezone was the same as I was a local candidate. The actual interviews were great; the interviewers were professional and courteous. I had a good interview experience.

I received an email one week later that I passed the interview and was moving forward with the offer. This is where another fun part begins. There were lots of emails back and forth, which could have been a single email, tossed between multiple recruiters (why? I don't know. I dealt with a total of 6 recruiters for the entire process). Long story short, it took 3 weeks to get a verbal offer.

Oh, and then, once I signed it, there was the background check. For some reason, we are not allowed to know the results nor the progress of our own background check due to confidentiality. What? Ok. They use HireRight to carry out this work, and they are downright incompetent. They took 3 weeks to try verifying my education and work history. And the best part is, they still couldn't do it, so I did it for them by reaching out and getting pay stubs to verify it myself. All this took me 2 hours; they took 3 weeks.

When I joined, I really had to try hard to separate all this BS from the actual opportunity. I mean, Microsoft, you really have to work on your interview experience. It... just sucks.

LC style questions.

Easy - Medium

OOD question