Kristian Kristensen’s Blog

As I wrote in my last post I had a job interview at Microsoft yesterday. I’ll try to summarize what happened.
I arrived at Copenhagen Airport at 19:30, walked to Terminal 2 and bought a train ticket so I could get to Vedbæk. It cost 66,50 DKR, which kinda shocked me! Got to Vedbæk, got off train and asked a guy for directions. Walked down to the hotel where I arrived at around 9PM. Checked in and went to the hotels restaurant where I got some steamed chicken breast with pasta nd vegetables. Very good actually. Since they implemented the new travel regulations you’re not allowed to carry liquids over a certain amount in your carry on bags. So I hadn’t brought any toothpaste. Usually not a problem since hotels are aware of this and therefore have a small stock of normally used toiletries. So I asked the receptionist if she had any toothpaste. Which she didn’t! Seriously a 4 star hotel and they don’t have spare toothpaste. The nearest gas station was too far away to walk, and no other shops were open so I didn’t get any toothpaste.
While eating in the restaurant I saw a coouple of guys that looked like they were going to interview at Microsoft too. Said hello to a couple of them. Geeks are so easy to spot
Got a fairly good nights sleep, and got breakfast at around 7AM. Had a taxi booked for 7:30AM. Upon checking out they said I had to pay for the room, which was odd because usually Microsoft takes care of these things. So I payed (more about that later).
Got to Microsoft, and met the 5 other guys who were gonna interview with me. A guy from Belgium, 2 from Rumainia, 1 from Hungary and one from Bulgaria. I talked with the recruiter on my first interview session, which was rather short. The reason being that when I was in Redmond they took care of all the HR style questions. There were 2 recruiters from the US. So I told them who I was and that I had interviewed in Redmond. After which one of the recruiters said that she remembered me and said that I got great feedback. Pretty cool!
I asked the recruiter if we were supposed to pay for our own rooms, because usually Microsoft takes care of that like the plane tickets. She said, no. So apparently the hotel screwed up. -2 poitns for the hotel. She said they would try to roll back my payment, otherwise I should just expense it. I just don’t really get, because we must have 12 candidates staying at that hotel, and of the 5 I met, we were 2 who were required to pay. Strange indeed.
Spent the 40 minutes waiting time for my next session reading the paper and having some of the water and coffee they’d put out for us.
Next I talked to a Senior Test Manager, who had recently relocated from Redmond to Vedbæk. We mostly chit-chatted, and he remarked that since I had interviewed with a test manager in Redmond, who he know, and who had said I was qualified, he really didn’t need to check up on me. Very cool indeed! He presented a short question on doing testing, which wasn’t really a puzzle or anything, just a discussion kind of thing. And he told me how they did testing on Dynamics.

The next interview was Software Dev Manager, who asked some introductory questions. What’s the biggest innovation in computing in the last 2-3 yeras? Stuff like that. Followed by puzzle questions. The first question he posed was:
Pairs of primes, (N, N+2), (5, 7), (11, 13), (17, 19), prove that the middle number is divisable by 6.
That threw me off quite effectively. I just couldn’t crack it. And frankly it didn’t really ahve alot to do with coding. While I was stirring at the whiteboard he typed extensively on his laptop. I’m assuming he must have been working, because I weren’t doing anything worthy of notes. Rather annoying. Got some hints, cracked the thing. Followed by another question. You have a tree, implement a depth first print of it. Did a recursive solution. Can you do it iteratively? Threw me off, but I got some working stuff out of it.

Next session was with a Testing Lead who had also recently relocated from the US. We chatted for a bit, and I asked him why people would go from Redmod to Vedbæk. The reason apparently is that people see it as a great way of living a couple of years in Europe after which they move back. We talked about the CLR, what JIT’ing is, ngen.exe, why wouldn’t you ngen it all before hand? Good stuff.
Moving on to a coding question. Write a method that reverses a string. So “abcde” should become “edcba”. Did one of those. How about reversing words in a string, like “This is a string” becomse “string a is this”? I code one up that does that. Do a version of the first one that is space aware, ie. doesn’t use more memory than what is already allocated for the string. I code one up. All in all a pleasent interview session.

Last one was with a manager at MDCC. A bit of chit chat, apparently he knew one of the lecturers at my university. Presented a coding problem:
“This is a sentence that contains
_ 0
_ 1
_ 2
_ 3
_ 4
_ 5
_ 6
_ 7
_ 8
_ 9 digits”
Make it logically true. Eh, what? So the point is that where there’s an underscore you need to put a single digit so that the entire sentence becomes true. Ie, there are 1 0, 5 1′s, etc. in the string. The tricky thing is that there’s some kind of balance. I looked at it for quite some time, again a lof of typing on a computer, and I’m pretty sure it wasn’t notes on me that were being done, because I weren’t doing anything note worthy. Annoying. Got a bit of help. Wrote a function that verifies if a vector is a solution, ie. given ((1, 0), (2, 1), (3, 3), … (1, 9)) it would check if it was correct. Then tried a brute force solution generator for it, which didn’t worked. At this point I pretty much didn’t give a damn. The whole interview experience had taken a sour turn, and it wasn’t pleasant at all. The guy showed a solution and explained abit about it. We sat down and he told me that my theoretical stuff was good, but I need practical coding experience. I’ll just leave that one hanging…

Went to the lobby again, where the recruiter told me that I was free to go, and that was it. At this time it was 1 o clock and I had been goign at it since 8AM with nothing to eat except cookies that we got. So I took my stuff, got to the train station, and took a train to downtown where I had some lunch. Walked for an hour in the city and went to the airport where I took my flight back to Aalborg at 6PM.

All in all I must say that my experience at MDCC wasn’t as good as Redmond. I seemed a bit unstructured and it seemed like some of the interviewers didn’t really get what kind of questions you’re supposed to ask. Not questions that are essentially tough and which only have one specific solutions. But rather questions that have different solutions with various kinds of optimallity. From the solution you create first you have a good base to kickstart the discussion and ask follow up questions. It is the problem solving skills and approaches you’re testing, not if you know specific properties of a prime number (just a random example…).
Anyway, I’m supposed to hear back within 2 weeks.

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