I recently changed jobs and had the opportunity to interview with several companies. In total, I had on-site interviews with 7 well-known tech companies, including Microsoft.

Out of those 7, Microsoft's interview process was the absolute worst.

I went through their event-based interview process. I was told that I would be interviewed by 4 people, with each person being from a different team, and I would have the opportunity to be recruited by any of those teams.

That turned out to be a lie. All 4 of my interviewers were from the same team, and it was a team that I was not interested in joining. I went through the interview anyway, and it was a mess the entire way through.

For my first interview, the interviewer was 10 minutes late and didn't even know how to turn on the coding software, so they wasted another 5 minutes trying to figure it out. Eventually, I ended up having to do a screen share and code in a plain text editor to continue the interview. The coding problem was very easy, so I still finished it on time.

The second interviewer had a coding problem that was a variation of the first interview, so that was easy to solve. I solved the problem optimally in time and space complexity, but afterwards the interviewer kept telling me to optimize it more. I responded that the solution was already optimal in both time and space, but the interviewer insisted that I over-optimize by short-circuiting some loops, even though it wouldn't change the asymptotic running time. I just did what was asked, even though it felt like such an odd request.

The third interviewer was also late by 5 minutes. Not much else to say here.

The fourth interviewer asked me a coding question that I had already solved on LeetCode, so I knew exactly what to do. While I was coding it, the interviewer stopped me and insisted that the way I was doing it wouldn't work. I said that I felt it would work, and after some back and forth, the interviewer allowed me to continue. Sure enough, I coded it and ran tests through it, and it all worked as expected. The interviewer didn't say anything about being wrong.

Compared to the other 6 interviews I had, this interview with Microsoft was the worst experience. I won't be bothering to interview with Microsoft again.

Typical array manipulation questions from LeetCode.