Telephone interview with HR followed by a technical Skype video interview which covers your understanding of .Net through to your feelings about open source & security policies of large organisations. This would have been an ideal opportunity for Microsoft to filter out candidates that had not recently used very extensive Azure and products such as Dynamics CRM at the depth they require, yet they passed me through to the face to face process and wasted my time further.
An on-site interview takes place during a specific "recruitment" day on which they process many candidates quickly. I was asked to prepare a presentation on Microsoft products, you get about three days to prepare if your life can spare it.
I was left in reception far longer than I would ever consider leaving an interviewing candidate at my company, but what would I know? I'm a dev manager for a small outfit not a corporate.
The “logistics” section tells you to prepare a 25 minute “talk” followed by QA and bring your own laptop (not sure why they naturally assume everyone has a laptop) I recommend you ignore the “logistics” section as I wasted an entire Saturday preparing a slide based talk for the exact time they specified and practiced with my other half to get the timing perfect. Also ignore the bit where it tells you not to introduce yourself as they won't have read that bit and may take a disliking to you, I suspect that did not go well for me.
On the day they wanted to treat it more like a discussion with two guys firing quite cynical 'knowing' questions at me every time I spoke, with the excuse that it was "role-playing as a dev team they might deal with" but derailed it completely as stopping to answer the questions or go back to a previous slide they wanted to pick holes in took up all the time. Just felt like lazy interviewing and quite disrespectful to candidates that have literally just arrived at Microsoft. My impression was they were very corporate, and it wouldn't be a nice place to work.
They delighted in stopping me if I even mentioned anything they didn't feel was relevant to their vague memory of the spec (which they admitted they neither had or read recently).
I was unhappy to have taken a day off and traveled to Microsoft to be treated in a manner I considered unprofessional. I wasted time preparing a hands-on demonstration using Azure which they didn't want to see as there was no time left which I had little control over. The questions were quite cynical and there was some muttering and laughing at my slides and criticising. This would not be a good interview for someone who was unable to infer this hidden expectation from the logistics section of an interview preparation document, for example, I am quite capable of hiring someone with autism but Microsoft would not be IMHO.
As I had to give the presentation first, that just left a bad taste in my mouth. They said that this was normal as their customers are quite unpleasant to them. I've worked with dev teams world-wide and we all have challenging customers but only corporate mentality can expect to use it as an excuse for a confusing ambiguous interview technique.
The later technical interview was good and the guys handling it were professional, but I was completely phased by the presentation debacle so could not concentrate. Expect the standard corporate white board and practice communicating architecture visually. Enjoyed the business interview too.
Had no interest in working for Microsoft following the presentation experience and won't be recommending it to any devs on my teams now or in the future.
The feedback was that I was nervous during my presentation and lost eye contact in my business interview" at one point" so make sure you stare those suckers out to the end.
