I’m in the SeaTac airport with nothng to do but wait for my 7:00am flight. Surprisingly, I only got sort of lost once on the way here from my airport. After taking an exit too early, it was clearly labelled as going to the airport, I wound up on the backside of the airport with all of the shipping facilities. Due to my planning, waking up at 4:30am, I was able to make it to the airport and get through security with an hour to spare!

This post means I survived the Microsoft interviews yesterday. They went well. I’m excited to hear back from my recruiter.

My day began with my rental car not starting. Turns out a Focus drains the battery if you leave the headlight switch on even the lights turn off. I ended up getting a ride from the rental company, but got dropped off at building 119 instead of 19. Not a problem, Microsoft has a cool shuttle service with little white Prius’ running around all over the place. Just ask the receptionist at any building for a ride to any other building and one comes to pick you up. Unfortunately, it turns out that I’m very bad at waiting for shuttles. The receptionist called two for me and they never showed up. But my first interview was with someone in building 119 so I ended up staying there though this meant that I only saw my recruiter for two minutes the whole day.

Throughout the day I talked to five people, two from the Live Experience team and three from the IE team. They all asked me one or two programming questions and most asked me specifically if I had ever had a experienced a team experience where there was a difference of opinions and how I dealt with that. Fortunately I think I had a pretty good answer to that question.

In case any of you are interested, here is a short summary of the programming questions.

• Image processing, dealing with RGB values
• Doubly linked list, very hard!

• Arithmetic with big numbers

• Comparing “lists” two ways at once, sort of game related
• More image processing dealing with RGB values, much harder than the first one

• Rectangular collision detection! I just implemented this in my game a few days ago, so pretty easy.
• Merging sorted lists

• “Safe” strcpy

All of these had some amount of discussion on how I was deciding to write it, follow up questions on stuff I had overlooked, or mistakenly assumed. I had a bit of trouble with the doubly linked list question, it was an odd scenario with an elegant solution. It felt a little puzzle like. And then the second image processing question was difficult as it required using bit values within an int for storage, something I’ve never had to deal with.

I didn’t have any “design a watch” type question that I was told interviewers love to ask. All the interviewers seemed to already know, or asked about my interest in game design. I’m not sure what that means though.

After all my interviews were done I waited a short while for my friend Eric Holk to get off work, Eric graduated from Rose last year and is now working at Microsoft. He got off and we went out for some pizza. You will all be glad to hear that we ordered a large, half variety of meat, half pesto, and finished it. We had to sit at the restaurant for a while longer before we could walk.

So that’s that. The weather was alright. A little colder than Indiana right now and a little rainy. It was a nice change. There is no internet at the SeaTac airport so this won’t get posted until I get back to Rose.