Kristian Kristensen’s Blog

I received an email earlier today. The content was brief:

Congratulations! You’ve won a 3-day conference ticket to JAOO.

The email was from Version2 – a Danish IT magazine – who had a competition last week. The basic premise was that if you added or edited an article in their IT encyclopedia you would be in the drawing for 2 tickets for JAOO. So I just jumped in an added a couple of definitions. Before it was over I guess I’ve added ASP, Web 2.0, LINQ, C#, and Lamdba. Some of these were definitely more elaborate than others, but that wasnt really part of the competition. Anyway, I won Super cool! I know that Jakob (former co-MSP of mine) is going, so is Mark (also MSP), as well as the guys from Microsoft Denmark’s DPE department.

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Scott Guthrie announced earlier today that Silverlight 1.0 has been released. He also revealed that Microsoft will collaborate with Novell and the Mono team to deliver Silverlight to Linux in the form of Monolight. Miguel de Icaza shares the details.

I attended a Silverlight event in Århus last week, where I also met up with Niels (an MSP from Århus University) afterwards. It was a mighty fun day, especially after the presentations
Now that 1.0 is out the door I can’t wait to see 1.1 in a more stable form. I’ve recently looked into Adobe Flex, which is very, very, frickin’ cool!

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It seems that Niels and I are now featured on the Danish Microsoft web site as Student Partners. Go check it out. I was contacted a couple of weeks ago and asked if I could answer a couple of questions. My answers would be used as a kind of “putting a face on the Danish Microsoft Student Partners”. Sure thing. And now it’s up. The page erroneously lists me as a student, which is wrong. Anyway, who am I to complain If my scribblings can help explain to prospective Student Partners what it’s all about I’m happy.

Btw. Niels is a Student Partner for Aarhus University.

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I’ve just read this article on ComputerWorld: H-1B visa cap reached in record time which basically says that the USCIS received over 150.000 applications for an H1-B visa allotment of 65.000. This amount was supposed to last for the entire fiscal year, but was all used up on the first day. Eric Sink blogs about his issues with the H1-B cap here. It also means that all applications will be rejected until next year when the new portion of H1-B’s are released
Given my situation with the job from Microsoft in the US this is bitter sweet. If I weren’t quarantined because of the 2 year residency rule of my J1 Visa I would’ve had to apply for an H1-B visa. However, you can’t apply for such without your graduation papers. I don’t graduate until July meaning that I wouldn’t have been able to apply until this date. Meaning that I would’ve never been able to enter the US for October ’07. It’s amazing! I thought that the biggest difficulty would be getting the offer from Microsoft, not all kinds of bureacratic immigration rules. I thought wrong. So it is with a bitter sweet feeling I read that article.

All in all there’s quite a lot of bitter sweetness involved in my Microsoft Job Adventure. I’s a bit like the chicken and egg problem: if I hadn’t gone to the US to study on the J1 Visa with the 2 year rule, I would’ve never gone to the job interview in Redmond, and hence would never have been offered a job. Furtheremore, had I been offered the job and not been subject to the 2 year rule, I would have been busted by the already spend H1-B Visa cap.

Gives you something to ponder about…

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Just a quick update on the job offer from MDCC. I’ve gotten the details but I don’t think I can disclose any of it here. Same goes for my thoughts on whehter to accept or not. The whole thing’s got Confidential written all over it, so I’m not going to take a chance and publish anything I shouldn’t have.
I’ve gotten a comment by George who interviewed in the same week as I did, and have also received an email from a guy that interviewed on the same day as I did. It’s cool that the two of them took the time to search, find my blog and comment. Appreciate it. So if you guys read this, please comment on your job status and decision process

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Following my job interview at Microsoft Development Center Copenhagen (MDCC) I got an email from my recruiter. She said that the people I had talked to during the day were “very impressed” and that they wanted to offer me a job as a Software Development Engineer in Test (SDET).
So super cool!

I got word on Friday and so I haven’t got the details yet. We’ll see what happens.

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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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This afternoon I’ll hop on a flight from Aalborg to Copenhagen where I have a job interview with Microsoft Denmark. The interview is tomorrow morning at 8 o clock. I don’t know what team or position (dev, tester) I’m interviewing for yet, but I guess that’ll crystialize tomorrow.
I’ll stay at Hotel Marina in Vedbæk, the same place that the Danish National Soccer Team practices and stays. Seems like a very nice hotel.

I’ll write an update once I know more, and do a summary of the day like last time.

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I’ve just send this email to the exchange students from WVU, and thought that I might aswell post it here on my blog. I might post some follow ups to further explain the process and what I discover during my visa waive investigation.

I’ve finally received an answer from Microsoft. First the good news, they are interested in hiring me. Then the bad news, they can’t get me into the country because of visa issues.

When you enter the US on a J1 Visa you are almost always subject to the 2 year home residency rule, which says that after your stay in the US you have to return to your home country and stay for 2 years, before you can enter the US again on another visa. In some special cases this requirement can be waived, and I’m currently investigating if that would be possible. However, it doesn’t look good. Microsoft have told me that if I succeed in getting the rule waived they would continue the hiring process.

So that’s the story, the end result is that I probably won’t get the job. And it sucks! If the situation changes I’ll email again.

I really appreciate that a lot of you have contacted me and asked how the thing with Microsoft went.

I hope that your New Years went well. Everyday life is starting to settle in, and it’s a bit sad. Who would have thought that you could miss life in Motown?!?!?

‘Till next time, take care, Kristian  

Og til dem der hellere vil have det på dansk.
Jeg har fået svar fra min recruiter ved Microsoft ,og de er interessrede i at ansætte mig, men kan ikke få mig ind i landet pga. visum problemer. Det visum jeg var på i efteråret har en 2 års klausul, der siger man skal blive i sit hjemland i 2 år før man kan komme ind i landet igen. Under visse omstændigheder kan man få dette krav frafaldet, og det er jeg ved at undersøge nu. Microsoft har sagt at hvis det lykkedes for mig, er de stadig interesserede. Jeg har talt med Fullbright kommisionens studivejeldning, og det lyder ikke alt for positivt med at få reglen frafaldet. Men jeg fortsætter; det skal i hvert fald prøves!

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Jeg var oppe tirsdag morgen klokken kvarter over 6. Skulle pakke, og have morgenmad inden min taxa kom klokken 7. Stille og roligt. Fik en kop take away kaffe fra hotellet med i taxaen. Udcheckning var nem for Microsoft tager regninen, så jeg betalte ingenting. Det regnede da taxa’en kom. Kørte den halve time til SeaTac, og det gik uden problemer selvom der var meget trafik. For vi var jo 2 i bilen så vi kunne køre i Car pool lane. Fik tjekket ind til flyet og aftenen før havde jeg fået fikset mine sæder så jeg havde gang plads. Lækkert. Plus der kom slet ikke nogen der skulle sidde i midter eller vinduespladsen, så jeg havde det ele for mig selv.

Security gik meget nemt bortset fra folk stadig ikke kan fatte hvordan man kommer igennem. Det er ufatteligt. Specielt fordi de restriktioner har været i effekt så længe nu at man da for fanden burde have lært det. Men jeg havde god tid, så blodtrykket blev nede. Greb en sandwich til frokost til tasken, og en kop kaffe fra Seattle’s Best til at tage med i flyet. Her fik jeg så ringet hjem, så det var cool nok. I USA er der en lidt anden holdning til mobiltelefoner i flyet. For det første snakker man gerne i dem helt ind til man begynder at taxi’e ud til startbanen. Plus ligeså snart man lander, så siger det blingeling, og så er folk igang med at ringe rundt.
Flyveturen til Detroit var rolig. Jeg fik læst min bog om Ipod’en færdig. Den er faktisk meget god, hedder The Perfect Thing af Steven Levy.
Da jeg lettede fra Seattle begyndte solen at skinne, typisk. Og da jeg landede i Detroit regnede det.

Jeg havde kort layover i Detroit, så jeg fik bare en kop kaffe, og så om bord igen. Knap en time til Pittsburgh, og så var det det. Fik min baggage, og så ud mod Toyota’en. Den havde det fint, og startede med det samme. Og så var det ellers mod Morgantown. Turen tilbage gik hurtigt, hurtigere end da jeg kørte derop, så det var egentlig fint nok. Der er en del bygningsarbejde I-79 til Morgantown, så det va rlidt belastende omkring PIttsburgh. Men ellers ingen problemer.

Ind forbi Kongen ved Morgantown Mall og lave noget drive thru og så til Rune, hvor jeg spiste og ellres smuttede hjem. Var i Morgantown kvarter over 8. Det var en lang dag. Mit fly lettede fra SeaTac 8.45, og så 3 timers tidszoneforskel oveni. Plus interviewdagen fra før sad stadig i kroppen.

Resten af aftenen kogte jeg bare, og gik tidligt i seng.

På vej tilbage i Seattle flyet skrev jeg lidt noter ned om det jeg manglede at skrive om. Ting der er faldet mig ind efterfølgende. Så d ekommer lige her.

I shuttle bilerne spurgte de allesammen hvor mange man havde snakket med. Og her er parolen at jo flere jo bedre. Da jeg sagde 7, sagde de at så var jeg næsten sikker på at blive ansat, eller der er i hvert fald gode chancer. Det er jo rart at få at vide. Grunden er, at mår man starter dagen får man ikke sin interview plan at vide. For den er meget fleksibel og kan ændre sig i løbet af dagen. Hver gang man går videre fra en person til den næste er det fordi de stadig er interesserede. Hvis man har snakket med 2 og de begge siger “Nej”, stopper de interviewet tidligt. Så jo flere man snakker med, jo mere kommer man igenne mnåleøjet.

Alle mine interviews var i samme bygning, samme etage. Så jeg røg bare rundt fra kontor til kontor og var så i ventehjørnet imellem. Den etage er hvor C# bliver lavet. Det er lidt cool at tænke på

Mange af dem jeg snakkede med sagde at C# teamet er et godt team, og der er mange sociale ting. Og det er ikke altid sådan i alle teams. Så det er meget cool. Begynder også a forstå hvorfro det er et godt sted at starte i MS. Alle de folk jeg snakkede med var også rigtig flinke og hyggelige.

Og så den sædvanlige betragtning om kontorer, jo flere vinduer man har jo sejere er man nok. Og alle har mindst 3 computere på deres kontor. Ved ikke om man selv administerer dem, og hvor man får dem fra. Men der var i hvert fald mange maskiner!

Snakkede med Yusav omkring den indflydelse man kan have og det ansvar man føler for produktet. Han blev ansat midt i Whidbey cyklen, og stod for at teste Generics derfra og indtil ship. Han sagde man føler et vist ansvar, og at der er en bug i generics derude, og så tænker man: “Er det mig der har bøffet?”. Det er meget cool. Man sidder overfor ham der har testet Generics i C#, noget man bruger meget. Det er helt uvirkeligt!

Mads sagde at der var en 70 danskere i corp, og der var kommet flere til over de sidste år.

Jeg tror jeg så en fyr fra Rusland som jeg hørte et foredrag af om .NET CE performance til PDC. Så ham igen i kantinen da jeg spiste frokost med Mads. Lidt pudsigt. Så også en anden en der var med samme fly som mig i kantinen. Hvor tilfældigt er det?

Det var fedt at snakke med dem i løbet af dagen, for det er nogle rimelig skarpe hjerner. Megt inspirerende og motiverende. Også fedt at man et eller andet sted føler man kan være med og diskutere ting. Det er meget tilfredstillende.
Generelt havde jeg nok lidt problemer med problemløsningerne, ikke fordi jeg ikke kan, men fordi det er længe siden jeg har lavet sådan noget. Der gør øvelse mester. Specielt omkring hele tiden at sige ens antagelser og stille spørgsmål. Men dte er heldigvis noget man kan forbedre. Har faktisk tænkt at når jeg kommer tilbage kunne det være en sjov ting at gøre hver fredag i grupperummet: finde sådan et spørgsmål online, og så tage en time i gruppen hvor man prøver at finde løsnigner og lave algortimer, og uden brug af internettet.

Den sidste jeg snakkede med, Adam, bad mig fortælle om nogle gange hvor jeg har “fungeret” som projekt leder. Lidt mærkeligt han spurgte om det, for jeg interviewede til en tester stilling, men har skrevet i min ansøgning at je over tid nok gerne ville være PM. Så måske er det også inde i overvejelserne, hvem ved. På hans kontor lå også Getting Things Done bogen af David Allen. Den er rimelig populær herovre! Men det er også rigtig interessant. Det burde jeg nok skrive noget om engang….

Det var også sjovt at se at de fleste af dem jeg var idne hos havde Ship-It awards for Visual Studio. Plus nogle havde også VS bokse med undreskrifter af alle team medlemmerne. Cool. På gangene var der skabe med alle de awards udviklerværktøjerne har fået over tiden. Der var helt tilbage fra Visual Basic 1.0.

Jeg fortalte Suma om at mit billede hænger på væggen i Redmond, det synes hun var meget cool.

Generelt var jeg fuldstændig smadret efter dagen. Helt færdig mentalt. Det er super hårdt, når man sådan er på en hel dag, og ikke kan gemme sig eller tage en pause. Pauiserne mellem interviewne bruger man på at tænke over hvad man skal gøre bedre næste gang og evaluere hvordan man synes det går. Plus obligatorisk toiletbesøg og drikke vand. så man er klar igen. Inde til interviewnw flyver tiden afsted, lige pludselig er der gået en time og man skal ud igen. Og ja dte er svært at kode på et whiteboard! Der mangler også ligesom IntelliSense…

Da jeg snakkede med Suma og palindrom problemet, nævnte hun at mens hun havde researchet problemet have hun fundet suffix træer. Så de snydre lidt, for de ved jo hvilket spørgsmål de vil stille og kan undersøge hlet vildt om det. Hvorimod når man står som kandidat aner man ikke i hvilken retning det går. Men det er jo en del af gamet. Og egentlig er det med vinklen på tingene man har de er interessrede i alligevel.

Og til sidst, så var dte lækkert at sove i en ordentlig seng, med ordentlig dyneværk hvor der var ro og stille! Det kan man ikke ligefrem sige om Arnold…

Billeder fra sidste dag på Seattle-turen

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