I was contacted by a talent sourcer, we chatted over the phone and essentially all she wanted to know was how much I made, whether I was allowed to work in the US and what software I used. In a week she found a couple of fits and one of them seemed like a better choice from my perspective. I moved on to a phone screening where I interviewed with a Principal Data Scientist. He asked me about a project and asked questions, especially on model validation, choice of evaluation metrics and how I worked with the business to define the scope. This was quite untypical for phone screening where you usually get tested on SQL and basic probability questions. I was then invited onsite for a round of interviews. This is where my experience becomes really two experiences in one. The HR portion of it was horrible. Interview rooms were not booked or double booked, and the people I was interviewing with had also been double booked with other candidates. It was very awkward to show up in a room and find another candidate in it. Aside from that, all the interviewers were nice and had good questions. Most questions were focused on machine learning, and most of the questions were extremely similar across interviewers. Nobody asked me to code a single line of code, and almost everybody asked me how to deal with a categorical variable with high cardinality. At the end I found the interview process easy, almost easy to a point it raised a red flag (if you hire someone based on this process, what's the risk I'll have to work with not qualified people?). After a week of silence my recruiter reached out with good news. He was very robotic and essentially threw at my the compensation package assuming that I had no option but accept it. No fuss at all, no feedback asked, no asking me if I had questions. A year earlier I had experienced a Google interview process, and while I was not offered a position in that case, the recruiter had been 100 times more personable in turning me down than the Microsoft recruiter had been in extending an offer. I give thumbs up to the Microsoft team and their people, and thumbs down to their HR.