Microsoft | SSE | Hyderabad | Reject :(

About me: I have a little over 12 years of experience, recently switched to a consultant role from a back-end dev. Trying to get back to Dev Role for past 12 months, finding it really hard. I've given close to 20 interviews in the past 1.5 years of which 5 are Microsoft and 1 Google. Whenever I apply using my profile I never get a call or get shortlisted, my wife created a profile and most of the interview calls I got are from her profile, so she effectively takes care of my profile and applications.

Microsoft Interview (Recent): I was interviewed for a team which will be formed in . I got a call from Recruiter took like a month after it was shortlisted on their careers portal. I was told there will 4-5 rounds of interview. All my interview rounds were scheduled for different timezone (all interviewers from Onsite)

Round 1: I was connected with a Principal Engineering Manager. Started with basic introductions and little bit about my contribution. 15 mins into the call he gave me a simple problem ( level easy) with arrays. He wasn't interested in a syntactically correct code and didn't even want the code to execute, but the focus was on logic and test cases. I was able to write a running code and also covered the test cases, all passed. I was able to cover special cases which the other candidates couldn't. I was happy with my performance. When I was asked for questions, I enquired about the team and what could I expect on day to day work. I was pleased with the interaction I had with the interviewer.

Round 2: Happend on the same day and it was quite similar to first round, the interviewer - Engineering Director, after initial discussion, he explained me about the product and what the work is like., then I was asked a simple question again. It was problem involving 2 lines, include line and exclude line, subtract them and print the remaining segments if any. I asked some clarifying questions and gave my approach, wrote code and spent about 15 mins coming up with test cases and we executed code, cleared all test cases. He explained the real world use case for this problem which he had encountered recently and ended the interview. I was happy that I could cover all cases.

Feedback: I got the feedback from my recruiter that my feedback has been positive with high scores and will be moved to Round 4 - AA directly.

Round 4 - AA (As Appropriate): This time it was with the Hiring Manager - Partner Director. He asked questions about my experience and what I expect from the team. He asked about conflicts and I explained the incident that I had in my first company when I had 10 months of experience, I was true and explained about the incident, how I reacted and did what was good, then how I was transferred to a different team due to my superior's action against me, I could see he wasn't interested anymore. But I've moved past that incident been 11 years since it happened. All I wanted was to be true. Then half way through he asked question on System Design and asked me to design Stock Ticker app. I gave my solution and we discussed a bit and I identified which part requires scaling etc and after some more discussion interview came to a close.

A couple of days later I reached out to my recruiter and I was told they were awaiting last round feedback, this was my first alarm. A couple of days after I again asked for my feedback so I can improve myself. I was told am not a team player and more of an Individual contributor, also would need to improve my System Design.

I thought to share my experience so it would be helpful for someone else. I wanted to do this if I make it through initially so it would've been an happy one.

I'm open for feedback from people. I would like to discuss how to handle questions on my past and how to switch to Dev work which I like to do.