I interviewed for a Software Engineer position at the Atlanta office during the pandemic.

The process took 2-3 weeks.

The initial talk with the recruiter went well and was mostly focused on my background.

The next step was a phone screen with a Senior Engineer in Redmond. This interview was very different from what I was used to. Essentially, I was asked to describe my solutions to two semi-easy coding questions.

After surviving that, I had a virtual on-site interview with five different interviewers. The first three sub-interviews were coding-based (with a few behavioral questions thrown in), and I did pretty well on two of them. The fourth interview was the typical developer behavioral interview. My fifth and final interview of that session was with the Hiring Manager, and this is probably where I ended up falling short. This particular manager was the head of a team that was particularly focused on customer satisfaction.

The rejection email said this:

"...you performed well like coding and problem solving, but didn’t meet expectations in areas like adaptability and customer focus, which are critical competencies for our engineering teams to be successful."

I'm not entirely sure what that means, but I guess that's why I'm not Microsoft material.

I signed an NDA before proceeding to the virtual on-site interview.