Opinion ID: 6327348
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Kvashuk’s Employment at Microsoft

Text: Kvashuk grew up in Ukraine and came to the United States in 2015 at age 21. In August 2016 he landed his first job in the tech industry as a software engineer at Microsoft’s Redmond, Washington campus. For roughly the first year, he worked as a contractor, and after a two-month hiatus, he returned to Microsoft as a direct employee in December 2017. Kvashuk worked on various projects involving the user experience at the Universal Store. The Universal Store is Microsoft’s online portal for selling computer hardware, television shows, movies, games, and applications. It is universally available on devices running a Microsoft operating system, such as a Windows PC, an Xbox game console, or a Windows phone, but anyone with access to the internet and an email address can create an account and place an order. Software engineers working on the Universal Store team (“UST”) wrote and tested code. Most testing was performed “in production”—i.e., using the code version that an end user would experience. UST members tested the steps that a user 6 UNITED STATES V. KVASHUK would go through to purchase a product at the Universal Store—the user’s “purchase flow”—by creating test accounts. Test accounts were the same as any other Universal Store account, with three main exceptions. First, the email addresses used for test accounts started with “mstest_” followed by an alias selected by the individual tester. For example, Kvashuk’s test account was mstest_v-vokvas@outlook.com. Second, Microsoft provided UST members with special credit cards (“test-in-production” or “TIP” cards) for use with the test accounts. TIP cards were not real credit cards— no bank would honor them—but the Universal Store accepted the cards as a means of payment without submitting the transaction to a bank for processing. Thus, TIP cards allowed software engineers to test the Universal Store purchase flow without money changing hands. Third, Microsoft suppressed the shipment of any physical goods ordered from a test account. Crucially, however, this safeguard did not apply to digital gift cards delivered via email. A digital gift card is a token—a 25-character code broken into five groups of five characters separated by hyphens—that can be redeemed for a specified amount of credit (“currency stored value” or “CSV”) at the Universal Store. A digital gift card purchaser need not redeem the token herself; anyone with a Universal Store account can redeem it.