After meeting one of the recruiters at a job fair on the east coast, I quickly secured a phone screen interview with two managers that went extremely well. They flew me across country out to Washington state for a face to face all day meeting. The time difference combined with a full day of interviews was draining to say the least. I interviewed with eight different people. Everything went fine until I interviewed with one guy who was also pegged to be my lunch date for the day. It seems that he was in some kind of political battle with the two managers that wanted to hire me. They warned me ahead of time that he may be difficult. The entire lunch was spent fielding technical questions...most of which were benign..and I began to feel that the job description i had been given wasn't the job being interviewed for. Went I returned, I had to wait in a meeting room while I was being "discussed". One thing you will note when you interview here, you will interview with a lot of people and after each interview they will leave you in a room while they talk about you. Also, during many interviews, the interviewer will instant message other interviewers and triangulate your answers with what you have told others. Its very distracting and unprofessional if you ask me. That's something they need to stop. I then met with the hiring manager who was red faced and stated that he had a heated conversation with the guy who took me to lunch. I then interviewed with a couple other people who's job it was to find out if I could be placed anywhere else. I didn't get a job. A few months later, I went thru the process again for another job. Again I had a phone screen that went well, two phone screens in fact. I noted that the manager I talked to seemed a bit down. I later found out he was being demoted. Anyway, they paid again to fly me across country, put me up in a hotel, give me a rental car, and keep me onsite for a day's worth of interviews. I didn't get hired this time either. The problem with microsoft is the culture...it doesn't fit with any other IT company I've worked for. Most employees are young and inexperienced, or have been with the company their entire lives. They have little or no knowledge of the IT industry in general or other technologies outside of microsoft. The project managers I met with didn't know anything that a project manager should, such as what a RFP is, SOW, PMP, etc. The technical guys only spoke in a microsoft context. They said they had worked with other technologies, such as linux, but in talking with them it was clear they had not. The worst was the job descriptions...they are unclear and don't represent what the job is really about, which is also a bit unclear. In the first set of interviews, I thought it was a senior engineer or architect position but it turned out to be nothing more than a 3rd tier technical support job for operations. Nothing I would really have been interested in. I also can't believe they spent so much money bringing me out twice and didn't do a better job of interviewing. The process is condescending to say the least. This is a dead behemoth of a company that still thinks its a startup and has something going on.