Although I did not get a job offer, overall it was a nice experience. Now here, I have to nullify a myth. They say that if you get 5 interviews and if the last one is with a senior manager, then you'd get a job. NOPE. NEVER. I got five interviews and the last one was with a very nice senior person working there for 35 years and still I got rejected. Went to Redmond a few months ago in a snowy winter day! There were five interviews: 1) A very strict (but polite) person, no smile on the face, explicitly telling me that he wont help me and wont give me any hints. It was all about quickly writing a bug-free C++ code to find a pattern in a string, implementing a post order tree traversal with and without recursion and a few research/design problems. 2) An extremely nice korean guy who asked about hash tables/lookup/insert/collision in HT and implementation in C++. There was another question about writing all permutations of a given string. 3 and lunch interview) A very nice person, willing to help: He told me to develop an algorithm for finding whether a matrix has some properties or not. It was 5 months ago and I forgot the question. I could solve the question but he was looking for a more efficient algorithm. He was willing to help and gave me hints but time was up and he gave me to the next interviewer. he told me that I was going to the right direction. 4) The fourth interviewer was very odd. I hope his behavior was planned/intentional and he is not like this. From our conversation, it was obvious that this guy is very smart. He wrote a long input string with lots of delimiters in the white board and asked me to write a c-code to change the given string it to another format based on some rules. It was a horribly vague, twisted question with lots of unknowns and exceptions. In the interview, he was taking nap time to time and he left the room at least three times. Again I hope that this was a test to see my reaction. The reason that I hope for the best is that at the end of the interview, he was the only person who gave me very honest feedbacks and compliments. But if it is not the case, that was awfully/extremely rude. So he passed me to the final interviewer... 5) a senior manager, working in MS for 35 years. Very cool, very smart and very fun, It could be easily observed by the flags/decoration in the room/some wine on the table in his room!!! By the way, I didnt have any whatsoever behavioral questions during my day. So this time, he just started chatting with me which I guess was the behavioral part of the interview. Talking about everything except work, about big corporations, hacking!! and so on. It was truly an amazing experience with that person. Based on the book, I surely have gotten the job, but ....One week later, I got rejected.

It started with a 90-minute online assessment, followed by a technical phone screen with one engineer. The OA covered two medium-to-hard algorithm problems. For coding practice, I mainly rely on "LeetCode" to cover different topics. For company-specific interview preparation, I use "Hack2Hire", "LeetCode Discuss", and "1Point3Acres" to find any recent original questions. All of them are helpful platforms. The phone screen included one coding problem and some discussion around edge cases and time complexity.