It's interesting to see how interviews often test more than technical skills. I probably would've made the same choice and asked for another question too man. Really enjoyed reading this.

A classically terrible interview question. Solving riddles in realtime is almost never a real job skill. _Maybe_ in an incident, but you’d be relying on tooling and experience, not an intern.

Same with leetcode at startups. It makes no sense. You’re almost certainly not going to do algorithms work. It’s only relevant if you’re looking for people willing to grind bullshit, which is certainly some jobs, but, again, you’re almost never doing this under arbitrary time pressure with someone watching over your shoulder judging and not helping.

My advice: if you encounter this, don’t work there. If a company doesn’t value testing relevant skills for candidates, don’t expect leadership to be strong critical thinkers once you get there.

Microsoft is a dumpster fire. You probably dodged a bullet. Source: I work in the dumpster fire

I’ve been through the Microsoft loop(s) several times over the years, and (to borrow from Tolstoy) each was unhappy in its own way. There were great people who would have been a pleasure to work with but always at least one joker in the deck. One just had to laugh because it was so obvious it wasn’t me.

I remember speeding through the loop for something closely analogous to my job at the time, only to be suddenly told by the hiring manager (who up to that time was a strong supporter) in a final interview that I wasn’t qualified. Not wanting to invest any more energy, I formally withdrew, only to get a call from him protesting why I’d do such a thing. Or being told to leave at the end of the day only to be called to drive back 20 miles immediately during dinner, and finding out later that was a mistake. Or being literally screamed at (spittle in my face!) that HPC was only MPI and nothing but MPI. Or being yelled at that Windows Server was exactly the same as an enterprise storage system like EMC/HP/Hitachi. The hits go on.

Theres a Sphinx working at Microsoft and you proved that you aren't capable of adapting to the team culture.

Life lesson learned for OP, when it comes to tech interviewing:

(1) the riddles you already know you answer after some staged deliberation to pretend you are working it out from first principles using your genius brain (bonus points if you can work "first principles" into the conversation).

(2) The riddles you don't know the answer to are the ones you say you already read in a book or online and repeat this until you get back to a (1)

I think it's a matter of communication sense. This might be the difference between how I think and how the interviewer thinks.

The interviewer has a prepared evaluation framework—one that's usually shared with other interviewers. The moment you respond with something like, "Oh, I know this one—give me another problem," the interviewer might think, "This person would randomly disrupt existing processes and conversation flow if they joined the organization."

In fact, as a freelance developer, one of the first rules I learned from seniors when transitioning to freelancing was: when you take on a request, don't argue with the client or agency unless they ask. Of course, during the actual work, things change.

I agree to some extent with the comments above about LeetCode being useless in real code. Most of the work is just assembling libraries and frameworks—the main question is often just deciding what data to put into a DTO...

A more tactful candidate wouldn't need to pretend to know. They could say something like:

"Oh, I think I've seen a similar pattern in a book I read before. Would you like me to walk you through how I'd approach it logically, or should we move on to another problem?"

That would have been a better way to read the room. The key point is that the first priority is the boss's face, and the second is the actual work. In the end, you have to satisfy your boss to pass.

So from that perspective, maybe the candidate was honest but lacked communication sense—and that's why they failed.

The conclusion might have been written like:

"Couldn't solve a new problem when asked to change + abruptly rejected the original problem by breaking the conversation flow + fixated on correct/incorrect answers without demonstrating collaboration skills."

Being smart and being effective in a group are similar but actually different. Once you're in a group, you have to flow with the group's pressure. Maybe this is the limit of my East Asian mindset.

Counterpoint to many responses here - when I have interviewed people, it’s a really positive signal if the candidate says they have already seen a problem- the we can move onto something more interesting! Not solving does not mean failure either. As a candidate myself I always mention if I have seen similar problems, such as finding primes - real example, and I was hired on that loop at Microsoft!

On the other hand, if I heard that a candidate had not mentioned they had the same question twice, or later let it be known they already knew the answer, I would lose a lot of trust in them.

Be honest; it’s more likely you will be hired by honest people.

Sadly I've seen this kind of interviewing from lots of places; maybe it's a technique they teach in college or something.

Interview questions like this are useless as they are not an accurate approximation of a real work scenario. I've frozen up at a whiteboard in an interview before, and then figured it out on the drive home.

The best approach I've found is to do a send home quiz, and then ask them questions about the quiz to test understanding. The test also shows coding habits, which tells you a lot right there.

Bonus: put some typos in the quiz that don't matter. Red flag for the people that get hung up on that.

I really loved to work there. I knew alot of friends, toured the campus, and even worked with prior employees that had good experiences. Every product before 2015 was beautiful (i still miss my Zune).

Then they broke me. I tried to give feedback on the products, interviewed, and really tried to reach out to them. Mostly ignored (except Outlook team, thanks ). The heavy marketing and tech debt within Windows is what did it for me. Rant over.... the interview felt like some trick questions at that time.

As I have grown older, I have realized dead-honesty is a false ideal to live by, especially when it comes to being rewarded in the capitalistic world. I know someone who reached executive level position in a big startup and all of his career progress can be traced back to lying on his resume about a NASA internship he never got, which he conveniently purged later from everywhere.

I wouldn’t go that far, but I think it’s perfectly fine to reverse-engineer the interview game and reap the rewards. There’s no reason to feel guilty about it.