I applied online. I interviewed at Microsoft in Sep 2024
Interview
HR Scheduled 2 rounds of interviews on the same day.
1st round interviewer has 20 years of experience she is a good listener, understanding, and makes a very comfortable environment which makes me give my best, she asked basic questions + 1 DSA + 2 SQL and asked to convert SQL into PySpark.
2nd round had 2 interviewers one had 3 years of experience which is less than me (5yrs), and the second had 10 years of experience. The second interviewer is grilling me like he wants to prove his supremacy to the other interviewer (girl). He asked questions about what he knew and was proficient rather than asking what I knew. There are no wrong answers because it was mostly scenario-based questions that had many approaches; still, he was like he wanted a perfect candidate. At last, he gave me an SQL question to solve and I solved it correctly but still got rejected. I know he made up his mind to reject me that's why he was doing timepass for one hour.
Lastly, HR from 3rd party vendors is the worst; they rescheduled the 2nd interview without informing me and called me to join just because interviewers had joined earlier. Also ghosted me without giving me feedback, I did follow up with her for 2 weeks.
I'd say TCS has better interview processes as compared to Microsoft at least interviewers/HR are humble, well-behaved, and respect you.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Given Dataset : (using SQL and convert the same into PySpark)
1. Filter our the records where data is missing or null
2. Extract the top 5 users with the highest activity per day
What is normalization/denormalization?
What is ZOrdering?
How to do incremental load in ADF?
I applied through an employee referral. I interviewed at Microsoft (Redmond, WA)
Interview
Entry level IC2 Data Engineer Interview consisting of Recruiter screen, 1 hr Technical Screen and Final Loop interviews consisting of 3 interview with the hiring team 1 hr each. The technical screen consisted of Python Pandas-related questions, two csv files were shared by the interviewer. Final Loop interviews questions were based on Resume, Behavioral Questions.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
CSV Files shared, questions were asked based on data frames, data manipulation, pivot and time series questions.
Not so difficult, it was an easy one to crack, they have asked some logical questions apart from technical questions. They also asked coding questions where they asked to write the code in any language