The process took 4 months. I interviewed at Microsoft (Iaşi)
Interview
I interviewed for the position of "senior software engineer" AT MICROSOFT ROMANIA for 3 months from July to October 2024, during which I was evaluated 5 times based on technical skills and received positive feedback from the developers via the recruiter regarding my outstanding technical expertise.
In October 2024, I interviewed with the manager of the newly formed cloud team to whom I explained my desire to participate in the company's progress, and my dreams of becoming a technical leader. He didn't give a damn about my technical expertise even though Microsoft prides itself on promoting values and leaders and gender balance in the company. The reason was a conflict of interest with my company, although I explained in the interview that I would dedicate myself to Microsoft and radiate the company.
End of Oct. 2024, the recruiter found another -female this time- manager who didn't even want to talk to me.
Conclusions: my technical expertise didn't matter at all and when I asked the reason for the rejection, I didn't get an answer. I can only assume that the reasons were to not compete with their “political protégés”, also probably because I was american and seasoned female and among other languages, i also speak Japanese. So the technical feedback given by 5 experienced developers didn't matter at all. In USA, managers are very humble because in a true democracy, the team decision matters more than their decision. In romania is viceversa: the “people manager’s” animalistic instincts would have to “like” the candidate - as if this wouldn’t be a brainy job! - and the candidate’s technical experience and prowess absolutely doesn’t matter. Thus people are setup for the well-known “kiss-up-kick-down” mentality, not for the meritocracy. Old communist habits die hard in romania.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Code technical problems in the language of my choice.
HR screening, one technical interview with the hiring manager then three interview loop which covered two system design and one dsa round.
System design was intensive and challenging.
It took them 5 weeks to come back with an offer. Background check was completed in a week, got joining date after 3 days.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Design a system for a startup company that let users post various types of content and get a unique url which can be shared with others to access the content
Started with a recruiter phone call and a 30 minute phone call with the hiring manager to negotiate a remote role since the job was based in Seattle and the manager agreed. Following up with five rounds of virtual on site. Four of them are coding/design. One of them is behavioral mostly leetcode medium level questions which I finished and I was able to do all the follow up and answer the design and time complexity questions correctly after the interview got ghosted for a whole month and got an automatic rejection email.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Leet code medium level questions. DFS, BFS, sliding windows and greedy algorithm. Follow up, asking some design questions and the time complexity of the code.