If you want to work at Microsoft, an important question to consider is: What constitutes quality code?

"Quality code" means so much more than just meeting customer requirements, high code coverage and shipping on time.

 The Cloud, mobile and the online space present new challenges that did not exist in standard packaged software. Our online presence “is” our presence and, as an engineer, you need to ensure a few things to deliver quality.

Read my list of four essentials to writing quality code in this new era:

1. Performance: If your code doesn’t meet the customer’s requirements, perform the way it is supposed to or delight its users, you have a problem. Designing and developing with the customer in mind is something that is highly valuable. This is one area where you can truly be creative and innovative as you try to impress your customers.
    
2. Reliability/Availability: In the live site/online world – this is king. If you are not up and running, you’ve lost your presence. Latency and working with multiple datacenters are two immensely interesting challenges that all web services have to ponder at some time or another.
    
3. Scale/Capacity/Fault Tolerance: This goes hand in hand with long term reliability and availability. If you do these things (or at least consider them) at the beginning, it will make future growth in size and scale or shifts between data centers more feasible.
    
4. Privacy/Security: Think about this in the sense of meeting different security requirements/policies but also mitigating risk and addressing threats/actual attacks. 

If you have strengths in one or more of these areas, we would love to see how you define quality code. Our career site has engineering positions that focus on these specific areas and it's worth a look to see what we can offer.
-Eugenia

 

(special thanks to TP and JV)