GoKawiilThere are no Performance-Aware Programming lessons this week because it is Summer Internship 1994 Week here on Computer, Enhance! This week will feature five posts about the programming questions I was asked when I interviewed for a Microsoft summer internship way, way back in 1994. Normally scheduled lessons will resume next week.
Long, long, long ago — I believe it was in 1994, but it could have been 1993 — I had to interview at Microsoft for a summer intern position. I interviewed with four separate people, and each one asked me a classic Microsoft interview “programming question”.
Of course, there wasn’t much of an internet back then, so I had no idea that was going to happen. I had no idea what a classic Microsoft programming question even was, or that they would be asking me them in the interviews.
What’s more, being young and inexperienced at the time, I had actually never had anyone ask me to solve a programming question on the spot before. It was a brand new experience for me, and although I would never recommend this style of question as an interview today, I can tell you that as a teenager it was a tremendous amount of fun.
It was so much fun, in fact, that I remember all four questions to this day.
This week, I’d like to share the four questions with you, talk about the answers that were “correct” at the time, and perhaps go a little further and ask what the “correct” answers might be today given the evolution of desktop computing. Each day this week, I’ll post an answer to one of the questions until we’ve completed all four.
For now, let’s look at the questions themselves…
Question #1: Rectangle Copy
I believe the idea behind the interview process was that the programming questions would get harder as you went through the day. So the first question was the easiest: write C code that copies a rectangle from one buffer to another.
I do not remember precisely which parameterization they gave me to do. Because this question was easy for me even at the time, my memory of it is less specific — but it was something like this:
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