In March I was contacted by Microsoft and was asked to attend a written test at janakpuri at Meritrak center. They called me for the position of Associate consultant entry level. Fortunately I cleared the test and got the call to come for an interview at ambassador hotel on Saturday.

I was happy, excited and confident that I will crack the MS interview. 20-25 people were already there waiting for the interview. I had to wait for 2 hours for my first round of interview.

In first round he asked some recursion, .NET and Mathematics questions (the questions were pretty simple and could be easily answered). I was satisfied with answers I gave and the interview also seem so. The duration of this round was around 1 hour.

HR told me that I have cleared first round and will again have to wait for next round.

Then after a wait of around 3 hours, my second round of interview began, In which they asked me some questions about team handling, production issues, and some Microsoft tools.

This round went for another 40-45 minutes and then HR told me that they got a very good feedback from interview panel and I have to come next day for director round. I was very happy and called everybody, to share my MS interview experience.

Next day I had to wait for 4 hours for my director round. In this round few general questions were asked and then they suggested that I should try for associate consultant lateral level and for that I have to come to Hyderabad for hands on, they specified that this round will also be an elimination round I happily and confidently agreed.

HR told me that they will send me the tickets in another 2-3 days and I will have to fly on Friday.

But that Friday never came….

However after an endless wait of 1 month I got the call from them. I reached Hyderabad on Saturday but they didn’t organize any cabs from Hyderabad airport to MS office which they promised they will.

In the hands on round they game a problem of stock market to implement in 3 hours.

I did that using C#, ASP.NET, SQL Server and Linq. And I was pretty confident that this solution is good enough to be implemented in 3 hours.

After hands on we had a discussion for about 15-20 minutes and then they told me that they are not able to decide where I fit in hierarchy. So they will give me call either Monday or Tuesday and I can leave for the day.

As per my previous experience I was sure they are never going to call, so I called them and they told me that panel said u r over skilled for entry level and under skilled for lateral level.

I was shocked…. More than disappointed I was aghast and frustrated with the total mockery that a brand name like Microsoft made out of the entire selection process.

This was not at all expected from MS. So, my experience with MS was a real bad one.

Though one of my friends who appeared for MS process and cleared the rounds got offer letter in just 1 week I could not understand why did they dragged my selection process unnecessarily and gave such a stupid and nonsense excuse in the end.