The whole process felt rushed and mismanaged. After passing the online assignment, I was offered an onsite interview in Redmond 10 days later. I was not offered the option to reschedule, as the recruiter claimed it was the only hiring event for that team (I later learned these events happen pretty often). I accepted. Microsoft took a week to send me the travel arrangements, and my flights were confirmed less than 3 days before the onsite, making it hard to plan ahead and get days off from my current job. I emailed the recruiter the day after passing the online assignment asking for guidance on materials to prepare for the onsites. I received no answer. I got an email from the recruiter with some prep material the evening before the interview.

Five days after the onsite, I received a call from the recruiter saying I wasn't selected for this role but that they had another opening that might fit me better and encouraged me to re-interview right away. I declined the offer and asked for feedback from my onsites on areas to improve. The recruiter did not have the feedback at the time but said I should be receiving it by email in the next day. That was 3 weeks ago; I'm still waiting.

As for the onsites, I had 4 hours of technical interviews: 3 on DS&A and 1 on Systems Design. The interviewers were really nice and helpful. The problems were about medium LeetCode difficulty.

One of the interviewers seemed a bit shocked when I said I was going to do the challenge in Python (this was already determined since day 1 when I spoke with the recruiter) and seemed to be improvising the challenge as we went, which made the whole thing pretty confusing. That didn't feel great.

Overall, the onsite experience was positive, but the recruiting process was one of the worst I have ever experienced.

Medium LeetCode stuff.

Create a cache system (hashing tables, linked lists...).

Labyrinth grid challenge.

Substrings in a string.