Best job interview experience I've ever had. I interviewed with their Havok team. - Phone interview with internal recruiter. Small chat to know what I want to do, everything was fine. - Take home quiz, just to be sure that you know the basics. Does not matter that you complete all of it, but try anyway. Try to do it by yourself, copy-pasting from somewhere won't help during the next phone session. - If you did good, you will receive a call from one of their managers to assess your skills. Given the nature of Havok product, we went over literally everything from 3d graphics to physics to coding. Does not matter that you know everything, but you should be able to cover as much topics as possible. - On-site interview in Dublin, split in two sessions: ---- live coding test, you're left alone with a simple exercise, with no pressure at all (aside from reasonable time restrictions). This is a real coding test, it has nothing to do with memorizing code or lengthy complex algorithms that you will never use in real-life, you cannot cheat your way through this. If you have real experience, it's extremely easy, otherwise is impossible, no matter how many corner cases of BFS, DFS, Dijkstra, binary search and whatever you memorized, it's a coding test for real coders. ---- present something you did and you're proud off, you're free to talk about whatever you want, as long as is something interesting. Usually they will listen carefully to what you present and ask questions. Then a final chat with the managers so they get a better idea of you. Received a very, very good offer without even negotiating, which unfortunately I had to decline because I received another one as good and it did not require relocation (housing in Dublin is insane). Overall very pleasant experience. Everyone was friendly and I really had a great impression from the team. This is how job interviews should be conducted. Please stop the insanity of phone-live coding session with shared screens, or whiteboard coding, it's useless and it only asserts that someone can open several tabs and copy-paste from them or memorize thousands of lines of code.

1. Recruiter screen: recruiter was friendly but had their camera off. They asked me about my recent work experience, my strongest programming language, and salary expectations 2. Technical Screen: live HackerRank coding challenge with a team member of the team hiring for the role, over Microsoft Teams. The interviewer had their camera off but was easy to talk to. The coding challenge was a LeetCode-style challenge that required the backtracking algorithm. Interviewer spent extra time aftwards to take questions from me and share information about the team and employer. 3. 3x "Full Loop Interview Technical". The interviewers did not show up to these interviews. I emailed the recruiter who told me that interviewing for the role had been cancelled. My overall impression of Microsoft based on their hiring practises is the company is dysfunctional, employees are disengaged, their hiring practises are disconnected from the actual job, and they don't care about candidate experience.