zlacker

>>lostms+(OP)
Man, this hurt to read. Keivan’s response is the right one. But I wonder if the arrangements and outcome would have been different had AppGet been closed source.

This is just not cricket from team Microsoft.

>>ak39+B9
This isn't secret news, but when you interview at MS there is always a secret / hidden interviewer. This is publicly known information from Cracking the Coding interview. This person is called the as appropriate and you only meet them if you pass all the prior interviews.

Per his writeup, he did not meet that person, which means that he most likely did not pass the interview.

He also for some reason didn't follow up on the results of the interview for 6 months, which is unique as most candidates will reach out. Assuming he actually filled out a job requisition, which he probably did to interview, he also should have gotten status from that requisition, so things are a little fishy.

I do not know anything about his case directly, but I would bet that he did not pass the interview and a decision was made to not bring him on as a result.

If Microsoft was trolling him to just pick his brain, they would have done more than two small events, and wouldn't have bothered to reach out to tell him they were releasing a product.

This response also burns any bridges that he had built with the team. He could have still potentially made something of his product if he had kept that relationship open and used his leverage as an existing package manager owner to influence WinGet.

If I was him, I would have at a minimum asked for feedback far earlier than wait for 6 months.

>>intern+og
My understanding is when MS decides they aren't going to hire, they cut off all communication, total lot drop. Sometimes at their own campus, no feedback at all.

It's really an angering experience imo. I mean, I get it from a litigious mindset, but still not very humane.

>>tracke+Mi
That's not true, usually you'll get a message from the recruiter. You might not get interview feedback, but you'll know if you got turned down.

Even if you don't, you submit applications through a recruiting site, and it tells you the current status of your application. It'll tell you if the application was rejected.

>>munchb+vj
Replying to myself, because the sibling comment is clearly at odds with what I'm saying, and I think that deserves to be addressed with more nuance than my first comment did.

I think there's a lot of variation in the quality of your interview experience when you interview at Microsoft based on how on top of things the recruiter is, how much the hiring manager prioritizes candidate experience, and headcount/budget complexities. Some teams don't have recruiters, so then the candidate experience is whatever the hiring manager makes time for.

I don't doubt the horror stories. For context, several years ago I applied for three different roles. I got rejected at the resume screen for one of them, rejected after the first phone interview for another, and I ended up taking an offer from the third. For both rejections, I got the news by email notification through Microsoft's careers app, not from the recruiter or from the hiring manager. I think it's a really impersonal way to find out after you've already done an interview round.

The specific point I was making is that, contrary to the parent comment but not the sibling comment, there is a standard way of doing things that ends with following up with the candidate. And, as a candidate, you do have explicit ways of figuring out what happened to your application, even if finding out you failed an interview via an app is kind of shitty. It's definitely not standard to ghost the candidate.