I started a new job at Microsoft in the United States. I am now working with the X++ compiler team. In case you haven’t heard of X++, you should know that X++ is the programming language that allows developers to extend Dynamics AX so that it matches their needs and business.

Also, I now live in the Seattle area. One of the most famous attraction in the area is the Space Needle, therefore I included a picture of the top platform of the tower. I took the picture on Saturday when the weather was sunny – it was one of the two sunny days that we had in the last three since I arrived here.

The biggest achievements come first, so as I already mentioned in the first paragraph, I managed to successfully complete a master in Computer Science at the Technical University of Delft, in the Netherlands. It was definitely harder than I expected but I managed to do it (see my project here). I learned a lot and I would like to share some of the things that I will remember from TUDelft (random thoughts that barely worth 2 cents):

• Research requires a lot of time and a lot of study. Until getting there (in NL) I never did academic research in the true sense
• Spending more than two years for a two years master programme is fine and students are not always supposed to be young. However, spending too much time should raise an alarm.
• Academic research can bring real value to the world (see TUDelft’s Incubators and research)
• Sleeping 5-6 hours/day and working the rest is not sustainable and one can only do it for a limited amount of time. Is more productive to sleep more.
• Wikipedia is not a valid reference

Next is the Microsoft experience. Getting in Microsoft was a big dream that I wasn’t able to complete about four years ago when I tried to get an internship. However, last winter I tried again and it worked. I spent one year as a Tester or, the official title, Software Development Engineer in Test (SDET) working on Dynamics AX2012. Before Microsoft I only worked in a small company (with ~50 employees) and the MS experience was something completely different. I believe that now I can tell the difference between working in different size companies and I know which are the (dis)advantages of each. I think the biggest gain from Microsoft is not the programming/testing experience but the understanding of the process and how big projects are developed.

Moving from one place to another is not one of my favorite activities – what I hate is the process of moving, not being in a new place. However, there is an advantage when getting to new places: you meet people and make connections. I met many great individuals both in Holland and Denmark and I will miss them. However, because of different social networks, I believe that it will be quite easy to stay in touch and, at least, exchange some words from time to time.

The people that I met Denmark and in the Netherlands were great and crazy (in a positive way). We had a lot of fun, went to a lot of parties (unfortunately not so many in Holland because of the study load) and spent memorable moments – I just checked and I have 2000+ pictures just from Denmark and I know that there are many others that I haven’t got because of various reasons. Did you know that people in Microsoft love parties? Being a geek doesn’t mean only going to LAN parties :-)

The last two years were amazing but, in the same time, extremely exhausting. For the first time in the last 4-5 years, I have nothing to do. There are no school assignments, no projects, no meetings, nothing. Even though is a weird feeling, I guess I should enjoy it and take advantage of the situation. Therefore, I hereby declare the beginning of my extended vacation.

“Well… That’s not a big issue. I use that PIN everyday and shouldn’t be hard to type the correct one on the second attempt”, I told to myself. The second attempt ended with another “Invalid PIN code”. So did the third and my card got blocked.

The PIN code just vanished from my head. I tried to recall it, I know that it must be somewhere there, but I can’t.There are a lot of numbers in my head, some are of other cards and some I don’t know what they are. I even unblocked my card, tried 3 more codes that I thought might work and got the card blocked again.

Why can’t I remember the code? Meanwhile I ordered a new PIN…

First of all, yesterday, which was my last for day for the year 2010, together with a few colleagues, we made snowmen in the MDCC campus. Those that saw them, categorized them as sincerely as possible as “the ugliest snowmen ever” but we are proud of them. The snow was really soft and it was impossible to make snow balls so we had to improvise.

Today, I celebrated Christmas together with 3 friends, 2 from India and one from Bangladesh. It was a little strange because I am the only one celebrating Christmas; for them is just free day :-) We cooked some Indian food – chicken, rice and something yellow that I don’t remember how is called – , drink some wine and laughed a lot. To my best surprise, the food was not as spicy as I was expecting and it was extremely delicious.

In a few days I’m going to Romania to see my friends and my relatives. However, I will not see my parents because they are in another country…

In the end, I wish you all:

And I leave you with a comic:

It’s been quite a while since my last post. A lot of things changed in my life since then; well, a little before that post. First of all, I moved to Denmark. Here, I’m doing an internship at Microsoft (Development Center Copenhagen). More specifically, I am a SDET working with the Dynamics AX team. Even more specifically, I test the developers tools from Dynamics AX.

Secondly, in 3 months, I moved two times. First from Netherlands to Denmark and then I switched place one more time because I was too far from my workplace. I really hate this activity but nothing can be done… And… I will move once more before the end of the year :(

I also started my master thesis project. (Hopefully) The outcome will be a really nice tool for Visual Studio (but not only). It will help developers and testers to find faster/reduce the number of bugs and will reduce the development time/costs. That’s all I’m revealing for the moment.

Least but not last, Copenhagen. In some sense, the city is both beautiful and ugly. Is a strange combination of modern and classic. A classical looking city with parks, rivers, boats, bridges and building with the same architecture, but having high speed trains, modern buses, shops and blinking commercials – that’s Copenhagen. It is filled with attractions (museums, theme parks, shopping places, events) but is really expensive (ex: the price for a beer in a crappy bar starts at 4-5 euros).  I didn’t have too much time for sightseeing but I managed to make a panorama picture (see below).

I will do my best to write some tech (‘geeky’ – how my friends call them) posts in the near future but I don’t promise anything. There is a lot of work to be done both on my thesis and at Microsoft…

This new theme is completely written by myself (yeah, I wrote PHP :-) ) but I used some other sites and themes as sources of inspiration. First of all, I tried to create a theme that will present just the actions that are available in and related to the current context. For example: you will not see the recent archive on the About page. Similarly, you will not see my link recommendations or details about me on the main page; for such details access the About page.

Secondly, the sidebar is fully dynamic and, usually, changes as you navigate through the site. It will display information related to the current (context) page. For the moment, some sidebars are quite empty since I have some more widgets to develop.

Voting was moved at the end of the post and is visible only when you see the full post. In my opinion, there is no reason to vote a post until you went through it. Also, the starts for voting were replaced by a binary choice (Like/Dislike).

The fancy 3D tag cloud was replaced with a 2D version. Flash is nice but it was creating a lot of problems with the rest of the content. Also, it was forcing the readers to install Adobe Flash just to see something that is an insignificant part of the website.

There is one thing that I had to remove but I miss it. The support for paged comments. The old plugin was not working well. Do you know any good plugin for this?

Least but definitely not last, the new theme was released because I need feedback. I am aware that is incomplete and might be a little buggy. That’s why I really want to know if you like it, if you encounter any problems in using it and if you have any suggestions of improvement.

Later Edit: there is a delay between when you vote and the result is displayed because of the server caching. Currently, I don’t have a solution for this but don’t worry, your vote is recorded and will appear in ~5 minutes.

• The opinions around focused vs. complete tutorials are split almost even (56% vs. 44%). However, someone uggested that he prefers focused tutorials (as text) and a download link with the full project. In my opinion this idea is great.
• Most people prefer tutorials of a difficulty level above or equal to their proficiency level. However, there were a few anomalies  in the results: some that ranked themselves as ‘Advanced’ or ‘Intermediate’ prefer beginner tutorials. This might have two explanations: they prefer beginner tutorials for the other programming fields or they just overestimated themselves.
• The result for the tutorial format is conclusive: almost everyone wants text + images. Just a few prefer video tutorials.

So, the final result is: intermediate or advanced tutorials, presenting just the essentials parts as text but allowing the download of full source.

1. Application
2. E-Mail Interview
3. Phone Interview
4. On Site Interview

I will tell you my story and how I went through the four phases.

1. Application

My blog’s title (Ex Nihilo Nihil Fit) means “Nothing Comes Out of Nothing”. You can’t get a job at Microsoft by not doing anything – this is true for anything else. The first step you need to complete is the application process.

For this, many options are available. You can…

• … apply online on Microsoft’s Careers website as I did
• … send your CV to different e-mail addresses (there are some dedicated e-mails for different positions)
• … apply through some 3rd party organization (job shop, campus recruitment, job agency, etc)

On MS Careers you just have to post your CV and choose the job you want. That’s all! No recommendation letter, no cover letter, no nothing. Of course, not every CV passes the selection process. Here are some tips for improving your resume (worked for me):

1. Don’t write it just before applying! Write a draft version, wait a few days and then review it. This way you will find a lot of mistakes and stupid things you wrote initially. If you review it immediately after writing, your mind will not be criticism oriented and will just ignore mistakes. Repeat the write-wait-review process as many times as necessary, until you find that the review revealed no mistakes.
2. After you did the final review and the CV is bullet-proof, ask others to review it. They will definitely find inconsistencies and mistakes and this will make you feel stupid. This is good because will open your eyes will make you go into an ‘I want to improve’ mode. You’ll try to correct everything. After you come up with a modified version go again through steps 1 and 2. Repeat this as many times as necessary. [Special thanks to Lucian Sasu, Nadia Comanici, Andrei Ciobanu, Monica Balan and Lavinia Tanase for reviewing my CV!]
3. Make it short and give only relevant facts. Initially, I come up with a 5 pages CV because I wrote every single technology with which I worked. There were a lot irrelevant things, I wrote Windows Workflow Foundation just because I played with it for a few days. I added extensive descriptions for every project, made a personal details section (name, birth date, address, etc) of 1/2 page. Others suggested to cut everything that was not necessary. You don’t need to give extensive descriptions, just add a few words. For example, I wrote “VS Image Visualizer – Visual Studio 2008 debug visualizer for images” and added a link to the project’s page – you submit formatted andcan embed links.
4. Add something that makes it different. I don’t know if this makes a difference, but I added some lines to separate items just like in the picture below. Definitely Microsoft gets thousands of CVs per day. You need something special.
   
5. Don’t lie! Tell exactly what you did and what is the proficiency level of your skills. For example, don’t write “Advanced” for UML if you don’t know the difference between composition and aggregation. Be realistic and don’t under/over estimate yourself.
6. Use the spell chick. Make sure everything is written in correct English and there are no grammar/spelling mistakes. Noddy likes a WC with grammar mi takes. You mght fail just because of that.

Once you completed your CV, choose the job that suits best your needs, apply and wait… The waiting is a problem because all these big companies like Microsoft, Google, Mozilla, Apple, etc. will contact you only if they find something interesting in your application. If you’re not suitable, then no rejection is sent.

I applied for an Intern Software Development Engineer position at Microsoft Redmond. I cannot apply for a full time position because I want to finish the master program on time, in the next summer – an internship is just what I need.

2. E-Mail Interview

January 20, 2010. Two months since I submitted the CV. I wasn’t hoping anymore that MS will contact me, when I got an e-mail titled: “Victor Hurdugaci ES DK” from Holly Peterson saying:

Hi there,
My name is Holly and I work with the Microsoft International Internship recruitment program.
We recently received your CV and would like to consider you for one of our technical internship positions in Denmark in 2010.
[...]
Please respond by the end of the day if possible
[...]

Wow! Now this was a good news. The possible bad side was that the internship was going to take 12 months. This might be a problem. However, it solved really well after talking to my professors. They understood the value of this internship and considered that will be possible to go for 12 months in Denmark and do my thesis there.

The e-mail also contained a set of 15 questions that I was supposed to answer when sending the response. The topic of the questions was not the same. Some asked HR questions like:

• In what city/country will you be residing in June 2010?
• Describe your ideal job
• Have you interviewed with Microsoft before?

Others were a little tricky and technical:

• How many lines of code would you estimate you personally have written in the last year?
• How would you test a function that is supposed to calculate the factorial up to 1000?

I tried to be as specific as possible, but still give exhaustive answers, trying to cover all possible uncertainties present in the question’s text. By the way, you can’t send an e-mail back to ask for more details or clarifications. I don’t think I am allowed to post my answers to questions. I will just leave them as homework for you.

Replied the same day (actually the next day at 00:20 in the morning) and I waited again. Now was better because they are going inform me about the decision, no matter if is positive or negative. It was just a matter of time.

You might have more than one e-mail interview. I met someone who had two with less questions.

Few days later, another e-mail arrived. They continue to consider me as a candidate. Someone from Microsoft Development Center Copenhagen (MDCC) will contact me to schedule a phone interview.

3. Phone Interview

This is where it gets interesting. Until now everything was asynchronous and for all questions I had time to think. During a phone interview you have to come up with (almost) instant solutions.

I was contacted by Mario Lucich who proposed an interview on March 5^th at 10:00. That time was not convenient for me and I asked to postpone the call. The new time, 13:00, was good. If you get to the phone interview and the proposed time-slot is not good for you, don’t be afraid to ask for changes.

March 5th, around: 12:30. I was preparing for the interview: a piece of paper, a pencil, a glass of water and I was really cool with this.

March 5th, around 12:50. I was nervous, I felt like I wasn’t ready for this and I was expecting for a bad interview.

March 5th, around 13:00. Mario calls on Live Meeting (we decided to use this application instead of phone – is more convenient).

The start of the interview was a relief because we both had problems with the headset and there was a period with “Can you hear me? No? Click-click. How about now? No? Click click … “. This showed that the interview was not going to be formal. Good!

After we solved the headset problems and went through the usual “Hello. How are you? Fine. How about you?”, we got straight into questions.

From what I read on the Internet, each phone interview is different. Each individual got a different set of questions. Again, no answers will be provided. I was asked:

1. Suppose <some name> will give you 1M dollars. What project would you start?
2. You are supposed to hire an assistant. For what qualities are you looking? [HINT: short skirt, big boobs, etc. are not good answers]
3. If you wouldn’t work in software development for what other job would you look?

An interview, usually, lasts for 30-45 minutes. After 10 minutes, the interviewer, dropped a bomb: “Victor, I’ll say this directly. I don’t think we should go any further with this interview”. Ups… I got upset and I said to myself: “Victor, you are so stupid. You provided the worst answers possible and now you missed your change”. And then he said: “… because you convinced me and you will be invited for another interview at MDCC”. I was completely amazed! After just 10-15 minutes the interview was over and it was a success.

I was expecting to technical questions. Other had quite a lot of them, but I got no technical question. The only technical part was when I talked about expert systems – my Bachelor thesis.

Again “someone will contact you in order to schedule the interview and all the details”.

Tips for interview:

1. Don’t lie! Tell the truth even if it might sound silly. They want to know how are you and not how you pretend to be.
2. If you need time to think, ask for it. Don’t say “I don’t know”. Take your time to think and say the best solution you come up. Express your thoughts and say what you think.
3. Try to be calm, wait for the interviewer to finish each question before coming up with an answer.
4. Stay in a quiet place and don’t be tired. Try to maximize the chances of coming up with good answers.
5. Don’t search for answers on Internet! Don’t type at computer! Usually, if the interviews hears this, is bad. Use just your mind (and eventually pen/paper).
6. Take notes. You might even want to write down the question you are supposed to answer.

4. On Site Interview

As agreed, I was contacted by someone to schedule the date of the on site interview. I was supposed to fly on March 4th to Copenhagen, sleep that night at Raddison Blu Scandinavia hotel and have the interview in the next morning. This is how it happened.

The flight with KLM was really nice! I am quite afraid of flight, but I enjoyed this one. The plane was not full so I had 3 seats to seat on :) The same thing happened when I was returning to Holland (with a minor difference. More on this below).

The plane ticket was prepaid by Microsoft. The same thing didn’t happen with the hotel room. I had to pay it and money will be reimbursed. Be careful that Raddison Blu Scandinavia is not accepting Maestro cards! I was really lucky to have a VISA card with me.

So, after a good sleep and a delicious breakfast I took the taxi to MDCC. The taxi driver said he knows where are we going and after a few minutes started to look on the map for the location. He didn’t know where we were supposed to go. I used my phone to find the location and I think he made a huge detour because I had to pay twice as much as others. The good side is that this expense will be reimbursed.

I arrived at MDCC 1 hour before the schedule. The interview was scheduled at 10:30 and I arrived at 9:30. I was hoping to take a walk through the campus, but it was too cold to stay outside. The lady at the front desk invited me to wait there, on a couch. I read some brochures and had some water.

At 10:30 I met Scott Simmons, the person who was going to be my guide in that day. He took me to another room with other interviewees (~10 . They were coming from Romania, Austria, Germany, Russia, Moldavia and Finland) and a table full of snacks and drinks. Whooo party! In that room was also a Microsoft Surface with which we played during the day – unfortunately is not as impressive as in commercials.

Near our room, was another full of interviewers. They were coming out when someone was supposed to be interviewed and they were going back in when the interview finished. After 10 minutes, one interviewer asked for me. We went to another room, in another building and the interview day started.

The first interview was really direct. I was expecting an introduction or something, but went straight to the blackboard and said: “You are given two arrays: before: {3, 3, 5, 8, 1} and after: {5, 3, 2, 4}. Determine what numbers were removed/added from/to the ‘before’ array in order to obtain ‘after’.” I had to write code on blackboard. I choose to write C# code and I implemented the solution using a dictionary. After this, I was asked about the complexity of the algorithm and the discussion went really deep in the implementation and complexity of dictionary (hash table) – “What elements to you add to a dictionary in order to make the Contains method run, always, in O(n), where n is the number of KeyValuePairs in dictionary?”. After a few hints, I was able to come up with the solution, which is not really simple even after knowing it. Can you figure it out?

After that he explained me what is his role at Microsoft and how the development process works – he was a developer team lead. We had a chat on our way the waiting room, in the other building. Drinks, Surface, chat with the other for another few minutes.

My second interviewer comes out from ‘The Room’ and we are going to a room in the same building. This was great because outside was really, really cold. It was the interview I enjoyed the most. After each of us telling his story – he told me about his life at Microsoft, I told him how I got to Netherlands and what I like to do – he told me to design a Tetris game, on blackboard. This wasn’t hard – I did some UML diagrams, explained each design decision and in the end had to write some code that will show a design pattern which can be applied to that design. I implemented a pseudo observer pattern and quite messed it up, but seems it wasn’t so bad after all. The interview ended with me asking for feedback about my design.

The third interview, thinking back now, was supposed to be the easiest. I had to design a function that takes a string as argument and reverses the order of the words, preserving spaces. Imagine that I spent 1 hour and I managed to come with a crappy implementation. First I tried something with regular expressions which didn’t worked eventually ending up by manually splitting the phrase in words and groups of spaces. What disoriented me was, that between words, you can have multiple spaces or tabs. After arriving home I found the solution in 1-2 minutes. I really performed bad in that interview and I don’t think the interviewer was impressed at all.

The last interview session was not really technical. I talked with one product manager who wanted to know what I want to do there and I think he was trying to understand on which position – tester or developer – I fit better. The discussion was awesome because I found some more information about the development and shipping process of Microsoft products.

I was getting tired, nervous and anxious after the four interviews. In the waiting room there was just me and a guy from Austria. The person responsible for me comes out of the room and asks me if I am someone else. He apologies and after a few minutes comes back again. We were still waiting. We gather around a table and he tells us that we both are going to get a job at Microsoft! None of us knew how to react. Then, he gave us some more details about the internship program and how are we going to proceed further.

After four hours of interviews, everything ended up with success. Me and the Austrian went to the train station, waited for a train which was more that one hour behind the schedule and finally arrived to the airport. We had dinner and a beer (duh!!) and each of us went to his plane – we’ll meet again in summer. There is an cool commercial in Kastrup Airport (after you pass the security check) – see the picture on right.

The flight back to Netherlands was quite good. We had some turbulence before landing, but otherwise it was OK. There were some lousy guys in the plane which amused me.

My tips for the on-site interview (you can find many others on Internet):

1. Take time and think. Don’t go straight into coding. Take a few minutes, simulate different solutions in your head and implement the best one.
2. Be goal oriented! If you need to choose between a crappy implementation that will work and not doing anything, go for the former. A working solution is better than none. You can say, as I did, that the implementation is not the best but you cannot see a better one now.
3. Sleep before the interview. Try to maximize you chances as much as possible. Not being tired gives you a good boost.
4. Don’t eat to much in the morning. Might sound silly but have a light breakfast even is you are tempted by all the good meals at the hotel’s restaurant. The last thing you want is to have problems with your stomach.
5. Don’t think you have to be perfect. The interviewer are aware that everyone mistakes and they will not kill you :) Think loud, explain your solution, try to prove its correct and don’t panic if you find mistakes (or the interviewer points some). Correct what you can and that’s it.
6. Socialize with the other candidates. No matter if you are competing or not with the others for the job don’t forget to be nice and socialize. Is good to have connections all over the world.

Yesterday, March 12^th, I received my employment contract which will start in summer and will last 12 months. Finally, I’ll go where I always dreamed.

Resources

When you are preparing for the interview you are searching for as many information as possible. I will make your job a little easier and share the best resources I used (in random order):

• Kristian Kristensen on My Job Interview at Microsoft Development Center Copenhagen (MDCC)
• Gary Daniels and Evan Goldring – Mock whiteboard problem – “Here’s a mock whiteboard session to see what an interviewer looks for during that stage of the interview.”
• Get Hired @ Microsoft, Episode 1: Write a Killer Resume
• Get Hired @ Microsoft, Episode 2: Partner with your Recruiter
• Zoe Goldring and Gretchen Ledgard – What is it like to interview at Microsoft?
• Zoe Goldring and Gretchen Ledgard – Riding the Recruiting Shuttle

The QR is a Quad Rotor Unmanned Aerial Vehicle developed by another department from the University. We are struggling to do doing the software that will make it fly. The software is made of two parts: one part running on a PC and another running inside the QR. The device is not yet advanced. Currently it has the minimum necessary in order to stabilize in air (gyroscopes, accelerometers and engines). In future, cameras, wireless interfaces and other gadgets will become available.

Today was an important day because we had the first engine test. The first try was not successful but after a bug was fixed we managed to throttle a little the engines (see the movie below). The device cannot fly yet because the stabilization routines are not implemented and no human will be able to control it for more than a few seconds without digital assistance. You may wonder how can one control it: through a joystick that is connected to a PC.

We (computer scientists, electrical engineers, mathematicians, embedded guys and a few others) spend most of the time in building 35 (‘The Drebbelweg’ or ‘DW’) and building 36 (‘Elektrotechniek, Wiskunde en Informatica’ or ‘EWI’). There we have almost all the facilities we ever wanted need: computers, blackboards, coffee machines, cafeteria, small library (compared to the central one), private rooms for meetings, etc.

The images above are in building 35. The one below is in building 36.

When we get bored this is what happens. Actually others got bored – we found the trapped doll in the lobby of building 36…

Hope you got an idea about the life in Delft. There is a lot of fun and joy, even inside the university. However, don’t think the requirements are low. Why do you think the building are open every day until 22:00 (10PM) and people actually stay until closing there?

From that list I read “The Inmates are Running the Asylum” and “The Design of Everyday Things”. Actually from the last one I read just 3/4 because the the book is too theoretical (psychology) and, even though I like psychology, it was a little too boring much – don’t get me wrong, the author offers valuable information about the things used every day and how simple is/should be the design, but the mix of practical and theoretical has a wrong ratio.

However, the former book is absolutely fascinating. Alan Cooper shows that whatever has a computer is actually a computer (or at least has that complexity). He also shows that programmers tend to increase the complexity of the software in order to make the development easier or, just because they can and see this a challenge. One of the main ideas of the book is that programmer cannot design simple software; they always design software that is supposed to be used by people with a lot of technical knowledge, who enjoy complicated things. Cooper’s suggestion is that developers should create software that is as simple as possible to operate, for the end user and, usually, the design must be made by a designer (a person who is able to understand how an experienced person will act).

Currently, my attention is on “Surely You’re Joking, Mr Feynman”. The book has a nice introduction about the first years of Richard Feynman’s life, but things may change as I progress with the lecture. I postpone any conclusion until I read the last page of the book.