Thursday morning (April fools no less).
I was up at some ungodly hour, like around 6 so I took a 2 hour drive around the deserted streets of Redmond/Bellvue caught the sunrise and saw some awesome houses. I ended up returning to the hotel around 8 for breakfast and off to the interview at 930.
The first building I went to was 19, which apparently is their main recruiting building which every applicant goes through when they first arrive. The interview went pretty well apart from the fact that it started 30 minutes late (not my fault). The guy and I really connected cause we share some of the same interests (ex: EMS stuff and outdoor activities). I found out that I would only be having 3 interviews after this and none of them would be in a group setting.
First interview went well. I was telling Wayne about how I would test the search function in TextPad. I think I scored some points by talking about internationalization and how to test that. My next interview went even better. Rather than any sort of technical questions it was a behavioral interview. We ended up going out for sushi for an hour, which was cool. I haven’t had decent sushi in a few weeks so this was a treat.
The 3rd interview I have no idea how it went. The guy had been working at Microsoft for the past 14+ years after graduating with a degree in Physics. I was told to write a program that would take in an array of number and produced an ordered list of them. Upon questioning I was able to dig up that I was allowed to make the function call with a pointer to the array and an integer that was the length of the array. With this information the problem was a lot simpler.
That’s it. The interview with Microsoft is now over. Time for some play time. I drove around taking some more pictures, took a swim and headed into Seattle for Dinner. There was this really cool place I went called “Fire and Ice” (no relation to the Boston restaurant) which served Northwestern cuisine. Dinner consisted of a chilled Tomato and Cucumber soup and for the main course duck with a peach/fig sauce….yummy. The restaurant overlooks the harbor on 1st and you can see the ferries leaving for the different islands, its rather relaxing. Walked around taking a look at a couple of different clubs and there wasn’t anything spectacular so back to the hotel for some sleep before up at 530 to make it to the airport for the flight home.
A special thanks go out to: Microsoft for paying for this 3 day vacation from reality, the cute Hostess at Fire and Ice, Robitussen and NyQuil for giving me my voice back in time for the interview and for Continental for actually making me reach the airport in time to make my connecting flight.