I don't know what the author wants from Microsoft. I don't know about the other questions, but the technical questions seem fine. What does he want them to know

I don't know what the author wants from Microsoft. I don't know about the other questions, but the technical questions seem fine. What does he want them to know if not how to do a preorder traversal without recursion? Name some obscure feature of Microsoft SQL? That will get you people who know specific pieces of software well, not good programmers. A good programmer should be able to quickly develop complex algorithms, irrespective of the environment or language. Everything else is pretty secondary to that. I can tell you that my hardest question from my interview was developing an algorithm to get the greatest increasing subsequence from a sequence of integers. Will all good programmers be able to solve this? No, probably not. Will all the people who solve this be good programmers? Probably more likely. Microsoft is trying to find the best of the best and asking tough questions will get you much farther than random knowledge questions (which can be picked up in an afternoon with Google and documentation anyway).