An exploratory round interview was scheduled by an HR from Careernet, to be taken by a senior engineering leader. The interview was rescheduled TWICE without any prior intimation. The interviewer did not join the meeting link. I've had to move around my schedule completely to accomodate the interview, but the unprofessionalism around it left a sour aftertaste. Regardless, the interview did proceed to happen the third time. However, there was very little exploration on data science skillsets. Instead, the interviewer provided a problem around designing a pipeline, and a bunch of open ended questions (for example, how will you use an LLM here?). The objective of the exercise was not clearly laid out. It felt like it was an analytics/data engineering question. The interviewer ask for my notes (i had structured my solution in an excel sheet), and then there were closing questions. Two days later, I got a rejection email. All in all, pretty disappointing experience. This coming from such a large tech firm like Microsoft was unexpected and left an indelible mark in me.

I applied through a general posting described as "Senior/Principal Applied Scientist" and as a result I went through the "new" process to hire applied scientists. It was by far the best hiring process I went through this past year. After the introduction call with HR I was matched with 2 senior Applied Scientist managers and a director and I had both technical and behaviorial interviews exploring in depth my past research experiences and interests. After passing this stage I was invited to give a research seminar of subject of my choice, and apparently the whole division was watching. In the end, I had a few other mini-interviews with team leaders that had open positions and were interested in me, and received an offer following those interviews.