The procesa was very long and informal. I never got in touch with a recruiter. A member of the research group got in touch and we had a call on Teams - this one went well. I was asked several questions about machine learning, neural networks, and basic programming. The second step was to talk to the manager of the project but this time things didn’t go well. The questions seemed improvised and honestly quite out of range. He wasn’t very communicative. I thought that was the end of it, but I was confident about my first interview. One month later I got an email to submit some code where I needed to solve a simple classification problem with neural networks. That one was easy. A couple of days later they asked me for a few time slots for a third Interview. They didn’t reply back and I had to send a reminder and finally got my third interview scheduled. That last one went ok too. They asked me about my experience in ML and research. In the end we did some live coding about implementing a CNN with Tensorflow. I did good and felt good vibes. Unfortunately, it has been almost three months since then and they have ghosted me. It is weird because the system hasn’t put me in the rejected list, but I don’t think they will call again. Very messy process.

After passing the CV screening and the online programming assessment test, I was interviewed by 4 researchers from Microsoft Research Redmond. The last interview was conducted by the leader of the research team. All interviewers were very polite and easy going. The questions were mostly "design questions" but with a focus in NLP research problems. I think I did very poorly in all these questions. I'm not sure why but I couldn't ask the right questions to clarify the under specified problem. I tried to "solve" the problem using only the very broad information piece given at the beginning. In the end, I didn't got an offer. That's ok. It happens. But the most annoying thing is that they just got silent. After FOUR INTERVIEWS! I think I passed through the whole process! And they just didn't bother to tell me I wasn't getting an offer. I insisted a lot with the recruiter before coming to a friend that works at MS so that he could contact the team leader directly. Almost immediately the recruiter called me to tell the bad news. I think it was more than a month since my last interview and their return. So that was very disappointing. Specially because I have hear so many good things about MS process.