Software engineer shares how she landed a job with Microsoft India, says consistency is key

By Divyanshi SharmaThe tech job market is highly competitive right now with companies firing employees in large numbers to cut down on costs. In the last six months, millions of techies across the globe have lost their jobs and LinkedIn is full of posts where people are talking about their layoff stories. While some are looking for better opportunities, others are starting their own ventures.

During this time, a Microsoft employee took to the job-search platform and posted her experience of landing a job with the tech giant as a fresher. She has been working with the company for over a year and wrote that ‘consistent preparation and active participation in competitions helped her prepare for the interview rounds’.

Microsoft employee shares how she landed her job

Hoping to help out other job seekers in landing a role at major tech giants, the Satya Nadella-led company’s employee wrote, “I applied for Microsoft Engage for full-time roles, and once my resume was shortlisted, I had to give an online test which had 2 medium-hard level DSA problems. The time allotted for this round was 1 hour 30 minutes.”

She added, “I could clear that round and was shortlisted for 28 day Microsoft Engage Mentorship project where I had to work on and end to end project to solve a specific problem, which was the theme for that year. The initial phase of this project was proposing an idea to mentor, then coding and deploying, and submitting a demo.”

She then added that after this were three technical interview rounds on 90 minutes duration each. The pattern of these rounds was quite similar.

“Each one involved 2 DSA problems, some questions from CS core subjects, and some discussion on projects. DSA problems were based on Graphs, Linked Lists, Hashmaps, Trees, Strings, etc. For every DSA problem, I first discussed my approach first with the interviewers and then with time and space complexities. When they agreed upon these, I coded my solutions.

“After these rounds, I received the offer by email,” the employee wrote.

Talking about what helped her prepare for the interview rounds, she added, “My consistent preparation and active participation in competitions helped me prepare for the interview rounds. This has also helped me clear multiple product-based companies.”

Layoffs at Microsoft

Microsoft, after letting go of 10,000 employees in January, conducted yet another round of layoffs in May this year. This time, the company reportedly fired over 500 people in the US.

In his email to employees announcing the first round of layoffs in January this year, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella wrote that the company is letting go of employees because of “macroeconomic conditions and changing customer priorities.”

The CEO wrote, “While we are eliminating roles in some areas, we will continue to hire in key strategic areas.” He also elaborated upon the importance of building a ‘new computer platform’ with the use of artificial intelligence. He wrote, “We’re also seeing organizations in every industry and geography exercise caution as some parts of the world are in a recession and other parts are anticipating one.”