May 31, 2026
Ctrl+C, Ctrl-Drama
The Four Programming Questions from My 1994 Microsoft Internship Interview (2023)
Microsoft’s 1994 intern quiz has commenters split between nostalgia and pure horror
TLDR: A programmer shared the four questions Microsoft asked in his 1994 internship interview, and readers instantly turned it into a debate about whether old interview tests were smart, outdated, or just cruel. The loudest reactions ranged from nostalgic approval to a blunt one-word rebellion: “No.”
A programmer dusted off his 1994 Microsoft internship interview and revealed the four coding questions he was hit with as a teenager, from copying a block of pixels on screen to copying a simple text string. He says it was fun at the time, even if he wouldn’t recommend this kind of interview today. That alone was enough to send readers into full comment-section theater mode: some were impressed these old-school questions still seem fair, while others reacted like they’d just been asked to do long division at a party.
The hottest split? Whether these questions are timeless basics or a giant red flag. One commenter said they still look perfectly reasonable even now, which gave the whole thing a “they don’t make interns like they used to” vibe. But another delivered the thread’s most savage punchline: the only correct answer to the string-copy question was simply “No.” That one landed like a meme, instantly capturing modern interview fatigue in one word.
Then came the workplace drama. A current Microsoft principal jumped in to say they’ve never seen interviews like this at the company today, pushing back on the idea that experienced programmers should already know all this stuff. Translation: the comments turned into a mini culture war between old-school C coders and today’s LeetCode crowd. And for pure comedy, one reader confessed they used to bring a floppy disk of their own work to interviews and basically tell people, “Quiz me and I’m out.” Honestly? Iconic.
Key Points
- •The article is the first entry in a weeklong 2023 series about four programming questions from the author's Microsoft internship interview in the mid-1990s.
- •The author says four separate Microsoft interviewers each asked a classic programming question during the intern interview process.
- •The post states that the author had no prior exposure to live coding-style interview questions and did not know to expect them.
- •The first question described asks for C code to copy a rectangular region from one buffer to another using coordinates and buffer pitch values.
- •The second question described asks for a C function to copy a null-terminated ASCII-Z string, and the author suggests later discussion will examine unusual follow-up requests from that interviewer.