> Your story is no different from the typical story of someone trying for non-trivial employment at IBM, Apple, Microsoft, I disagree on that last one. I have

> Your story is no different from the typical story of someone trying for non-trivial employment at IBM, Apple, Microsoft, I disagree on that last one. I have interviewed at MS twice, once out of college, and again after I left the company and wanted to go back to lead a team doing some great stuff. Since being hired I have myself been involved in many interview loops. The interviewing process at Microsoft is very streamlined. If there are a multiple highly qualified candidates for a job it may take 1-2 weeks to get back to you, we naturally want to interview everyone first and then make a decision. If we encounter a situation where multiple candidates that we want to hire and extra head count exists we may try to hire both, or try to give one of them to another team who does have head count. The overall idea here is that Microsoft wants to say hire to all exceptional candidates that come our way. For the majority of interviews however, we can get back to the candidate within a couple of days. (FWIW I've had the exact same turn around interviewing at Amazon.) Now part of this is being Microsoft does not have Hiring Committees. This is both good and bad. Some teams do not have a consistent bar for hiring, and MS's interview training class just goes over what we legally are not allowed to say. The good aspect is that we can be more agile hiring people, and our interview process varies based on teams needs. While we want to always hire with an eye towards future potential and growth, different teams and orgs need different skill sets. A hardware team may want its software engineers to know how to communicate with EEs and Mechanical Engineers, and future growth in that org means being able to stretch across multiple disciplines. In contrast, Azure is going to look more at how well a Dev can live in the world of ops, DB, and their understanding of large scale computing. The downside is, as mentioned above, that some teams don't hold the same bar on candidates. Now all this said, I have of course seen MS disqualify very highly qualified candidates for asinine reasons, again this is due to there not being a standardized hiring process.