I recently got interviewed by MS, I met 3 individuals on the team hiring, they discussed what I'd done previously, and what they were doing now. The first int

I recently got interviewed by MS, I met 3 individuals on the team hiring, they discussed what I'd done previously, and what they were doing now. The first interviewer was focused on culture and values. The second interviewer asked me to describe how I'd approach pathfinding a simple 2D maze, and explicitly told me that they weren't worried about "best" algorithms like A*, but were more interested in how I'd model the problem in the first place, and seemed happy when I suggested building a graph as a better way to reason about it, and write readable code than just index twiddling a 2D array. They then asked me to code review a pre-existing index twiddling solution, they liked my suggestions, and I even picked up an error (that didn't seem deliberate) that one of my suggestions would've prevented. The last interviewer was more interested in architecture, and their only technical question was "name a design pattern you've used and why you used it". Then they asked me to submit a GitHub repo that translated Roman numerals into Arabic numerals in Go, with a specific requirement to "obey Postel's law". At the same time, a small medtech firm looking to recruit me for a data engineering role had me meet two engineers for an hour, then complete an online coding test on one of those annoying online editors, where the goal was to calculate waiting times in TypeScript from ISO-8601 formatted strings. Then I met more of their engineers, got asked trivia like "What's the difference between ETL and ELT?" and then did some live coding on that same annoying online editor to implement the "maximum sub-array" problem before discussing Big-O... I felt like they'd taken algorithmic questions you'd use for a recent CS grad and applied it to a senior data engineering role where if I'm ever needing to calculate the maximum sub-array in TS, you're doing very many bad things. So all in all, MS's interview technique felt far more relevant and useful.