Wow, my first few blog posts and already I’m a dilatory blogger. I’ll try to do better—I’ve just been so swamped. I’ve got a few moments now as I’m waiting for a job to print (argh! I hate how planes make you depend on hard copy!), and given that this printer makes me want to go all Office Space on it, I might actually have time to finish a post while I’m waiting.
I’ve been trying to learn more about Indigo in the past month, but there’s just so much to learn. As I get up to speed, I’ll try to put what I’ve learned in the blog (at a more frequent rate than I have been, too). Soon you’ll even have bits, as we’ll be releasing a Community Technology Preview in March, “even if it’s March 38th or 43rd”, as Eric Rudder, VP of Server and Tools, put it in his VSLive! San Francisco keynote.
For now, let me tell you a bit more about how I got this job. Before I joined the Indigo team, I was a program manager for the Visual C++ team. In that job, I got to do just about everything I could find—a little bit of evangelism, a little bit of marketing, a little bit of feature design. I decided I liked the marketing work best, and, after talking to some people on the Indigo team, thought this would be an awesome team to join—supersmart people, exciting product, great team dynamic. So I thought, “why not?”, and interviewed for the product manager position.
First I got to talk to the two group program managers of the Indigo product team, the people in charge of designing and shipping the product itself. In my first interview, I was asked to design a customer event. I didn’t realize that one of my first tasks in my job would be to actually help put on the event I had designed—we’ll see how well that works out in practice. In my second interview, I was essentially asked to design hotmail. I was rusty on my distributed systems technology and it definitely showed, but my interviewer was great at leading me through the question.
Then I went to another building (the maze I work in now) and talked to some of the people I’d potentially work with. I talked with Becky Dias, the product manager for WSE, and Jeff Sandquist, one of the Channel 9 guys who now manages an evangelism team, about things like competition, community, and blogging. They were definitely fun conversations.
Finally I talked to the people who actually had to hire me: my manager and his manager. They threw all sorts of questions at me, from “what would you say if a reporter called you up and asked you about a security hole you didn’t know about (and you can’t say ‘head for the border’)?” to “how would you market your #2 choice for a cell phone, the one you didn’t buy?”
And then some time went by, and either they decided they liked me or everyone else who was interested in the position headed for the border, so here I am.
I know it sounds odd, but I really like interviewing—it’s definitely exhausting and occasionally frustrating, but I find you get to meet a lot of interesting people you wouldn’t otherwise talk with, who have ideas that are fun to discuss. It stretches my brain to think so hard, and I love that. What’s funny is that I’ve been feeling that same brain-stretching almost nonstop since I started working in this group; I haven’t had to think this hard in months or years. It feels great (except when I’m afraid my head will explode from too much Indigo; wow, that’s an image I could’ve done without), and working late is a great excuse to skip the gym.
