Interview Experiences

Real candidates, real loops: every round, what was asked, and how it ended.

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9 stories

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MicrosoftData Scientist
Reported Jul 2026

Microsoft Data Scientist interview: timed HackerRank assessment

Most of my process was a timed online technical assessment. It had several HackerRank-style questions and a predefined window of around an hour to finish everything. There was little conversational interviewing beyond that. It felt like a fast evaluation of technical problem solving, with very little room to recover from a missed question. I did not receive an offer. The straightforward but tough…

Online Assessment0
MicrosoftData Scientist
Reported Jul 2026

Microsoft Data Scientist interview: modeling and experiment design

The loop was intense and technically demanding, with work that felt closer to real modeling than trivia. After a recruiter-style step, I discussed an ML project and the trade-offs in evaluating it. We focused on classification with asymmetric costs, and I explained SHAP in the context of what I'd built. I was surprised to get a precision-and-recall question very close to one I'd practiced. Later…

OfferTechnical Screen0
MicrosoftData ScientistSenior+
Jun 2026

AI-Assisted ML Round, Rejected on Level Calibration

Background: about 4 years of YOE, full-stack DS at a startup. Timeline: Cold apply → recruiter reach out: 9 weeks Reach out → phone screen: 3 weeks Phone screen → onsite: 4 weeks (got the notice in the third week) Onsite → result: 5 weeks (I heard some people waited even longer) I'd long heard that Microsoft interviews move slowly, and now I've experienced it myself. Phone screen: resume walkthro…

RejectedOnsite0
MicrosoftData Scientist
Feb 2026

Three Back-to-Back Interviews After the OA

The OA was an hour long with two questions, pretty simple. Three days after that I got an interview invite. Three interviews back to back, three hours total, all with very senior people interviewing. The first interviewer worked on software/systems and had me write a problem, roughly medium difficulty. Org chart → Tree. Top-down, level by level → BFS. "Show the entire layer first" → Queue. The se…

OfferOnsite0
MicrosoftData ScientistIntern
Feb 2026

Three Back-to-Back Rounds After the OA

Locked — open it to unlock the full story with XP.

OfferOnsiteXP0
MicrosoftData ScientistIntern
Jan 2026

OA, Then Three Back-to-Back Rounds, Offer a Month Later

Timeline 10/13: HackerRank OA — one LeetCode problem and one data-processing problem 11/03: 3 rounds, back-to-back interviews 12/03: offer Background: Statistics PhD, resume roughly 80% LLM-related research, no conference publications at the time of the interview (a few projects were finished and submitted), no industry experience. Round 1: the interviewer was a senior guy. 30 minutes of behavior…

OfferOnsite0
MicrosoftData Scientist
Jan 2026

OA Plus Three Back-to-Back Senior Interviews in One Day

Locked — open it to unlock the full story with XP.

OfferOnsiteXP0
MicrosoftData ScientistNew Grad
Nov 2025

Three Back-to-Back Rounds, Offer a Month Later

Timeline 10/13: HackerRank OA — one LeetCode problem, one data-processing problem 11/03: 3 rounds, back-to-back interviews 12/03: Offer Background: Statistics PhD, resume was 80% large-language-model-related research, no conference publications at the time of interviewing (a few projects were finished and being submitted), no industry experience. Round 1: the interviewer gave me 30 min of behavio…

OfferOnsite0
MicrosoftData Scientist
Oct 2025

Four Weeks of Email Chaos, Then the Position Was Filled

Sharing a bizarre experience today: the Microsoft interviewer couldn't receive Gmail emails. I got notified four weeks ago for a coding screen round. I needed to provide 5 interview windows, so I replied, and then... nothing. I waited three days, followed up, and the interviewer said she never received my last email — checked her spam folder too, nothing there. But this one she got. So I gave new…

RejectedOther0

What are interview experiences?

An interview experience is a candidate's own account of a hiring loop — not a question bank entry. It tells you the shape of the process: how many rounds there were, what each round actually tested, how long the gaps between them ran, and what the recruiter said at the end. That context is the part a question list cannot give you.

How to read them

Weight recent write-ups more heavily — interview loops change, often within a year. Read several for the same company and role rather than one: a single account tells you what one interviewer asked, while five tell you what the bar is. Note the outcome badge too, since a rejection write-up usually explains the gap far more precisely than an offer one.

Share your own

Every published experience earns 50 XP, and each of the first 3 likes it receives in a day earns you 10 XP more. Likes must come from established accounts; like-for-like swaps and likes from your own second account are not paid. Write it while the details are fresh — the round order, the exact prompts, and how much time you were given are what the next reader needs.

Share your experience to earn XP