An external recruiter, to whom Microsoft seem to have offloaded all recruitment work, approached me with an SRE role opportunity. I showed disinterest as I am a backend developer looking for a backend role. He insisted that I should try, as the role is backend-centric and not to be misled by the title. I agreed to take it up.

Within a week, I received a call informing me about an interview scheduled for the next 3-4 days. The dates were not changeable. There was no other option but to go ahead with it.

I had two rounds over Microsoft Teams. I was asked to keep my video and screen sharing on (to ensure I wasn't cheating), whereas the panelists did not have their videos on. I was specifically asked to share my whole screen and not just one window.

Contrary to what the recruiter led me to believe, both rounds were SRE-centric trivia, and to most of the questions, I kept responding that I didn't have enough knowledge on those topics. The interviews ended soon enough after some basic programming questions.

Overall experience:

1. The recruiter's information was misleading. Representing Microsoft, these were the poorest professionals I've encountered.

2. One of the panelists on the call itself informed me that I would be better suited for a backend role than SRE. When I said I was hoping for a backend-centric role, the panelist said he would inform the recruiter about this. Generally, it is not wise to communicate feedback from the panel. The panelists were not trained for the interview process.

3. Both panels, as mentioned in another Glassdoor post, were at the same level they were hiring for, which creates prejudice. Most of the time, panelists overlapped and cut me off while I was speaking. They picked one word from my response and asked the next question without even letting me finish.

e.g.: Q. How does Redis ensure persistence? A. Data is kept in primary memory, but it allows snapshots to be taken at... Q. What is a snapshot?

Kubernetes Trivia:

1. What service type have you used to expose your service?
2. What's the difference among ClusterIP, NodePort, and LoadBalancer?
3. Explain Kubernetes general architecture.
4. In Kubernetes, how do you know where the logs are?

SRE Trivia:

1. How have you designed monitoring for your microservices?
2. What protocol were you using for metric collection?
3. Difference between TCP and UDP.
4. How do you debug if your OS (running on the network) is hung?
5. What are the strategies for data replication across regions?
6. What Linux commands do you use for debugging?
7. What are in-memory databases? Examples?
8. What is a DB snapshot? How does it work?
9. What is the difference between Docker and a VM?
10. How does an OS boot?

Coding Trivia:

1. How do multiple threads update the same variable?
2. Difference between goroutines and threads.
3. Do you write unit tests?

Coding Problems:

1. Write code showing how two goroutines would update the same variable.
2. Write a program to sum two numbers. The numbers will be given in an array presentation, e.g., 123 as [1, 2, 3]. Output the sum in the same format.
3. Write a program to check if parentheses are balanced. '(', '[', '{' are the three types of parentheses that can be provided in the input string.
4. Write a program to reverse a linked list using recursion.