Hey! It's my TAP customers! And other ramblings about work.
No one likes a stale blog, so I'm sitting in my kitchen at 8pm with a glass of wine trying to find inspiration. Fortunately, this time it's not too difficult. On Monday we issued a Press Release announcing the availability of our Beta. It reveals some of our very cool new features: the grammar design and tuning advisors, conversational understanding, and the dialog workflow designer, all of which are designed to make building good voice response applications easier and faster.
And if that wasn't exciting enough, three of my TAP customers participated in a Q&A session with Microsoft PressPass - thanks guys! We even got a special place on the PressPass home page, under Highlights. Woo hoo! Since we're a small product team at Microsoft, compared to giants like Windows and Exchange, I am really excited to see Speech Server emphasized like that. We were also featured prominently on our internal website under "Headline News".
I'm crazy busy planning for the TAP training event next week. The nice thing is that I'm very focused - everything that doesn't have to do with the event is getting filed into a folder called "AfterTraining", for me to deal with later. I've been checking off items on my To-Do list like a madwoman, and it's very satisfying. Yeah, I'm that geeky.
After the training, I'm planning to take a few days off for a road trip down to the Bay Area to see some old friends, some from college, and some who I used to work with at Deloitte Consulting.
In September, I'll have spent the same amount of time at Microsoft as I did at Deloitte (3 years + 10 months). I can't believe it - time has really flown! Which will bring me to a total of nearly 8 years "in the industry". That's crazy. It seems like it wasn't that long ago when I went shopping with my mom to buy "work-appropriate" clothes after spending roughly 18 years in school. Of course, I've now come full circle - Microsoft's dress code is casual (very casual!) so I barely have any official "work clothes" anymore.
I like the corporate world, much better than I ever liked working in the academic world. I spent 4 summers during college and 2 years in grad school doing biochemistry and molecular biology research. I knew I was technically good at running the procedures and writing up and presenting my results, but I didn't have that "spark".
While I was in grad school, I read this quote from Barbara McClintock, 1983 Nobel Prizewinner, about her enthusiasm for her work in genetics - "I couldn’t wait to get into the laboratory in the morning and I just hated sleeping." That quote hit me like lightning. I realized I was supposed to be *excited* about my job, and if I didn't like what I was doing, I needed to find something else to do. So a few months later, I interviewed with several consulting companies, launched myself into a career change and didn't look back.
To this day I don't regret "dropping out" of my Ph.D. program, and the number of "Barbara McClintock" days far outweighs the ones where I don't want to go in. If I had stayed in graduate school, I would probably have gotten my PhD around mid-2002, and would now be completing a post-doctoral fellowship, which would have been yet another step before getting a "real job" in academia or industry. In contrast, I've had a "real job" for 7.5 years now.
I've had some great opportunities at Microsoft in the short time I've been here: traveling to Germany, India, and Singapore; writing large portions of a public whitepaper on the Windows package installer; project-managing the release of that installer, which was used for Windows and other products' hotfixes and other updates; getting to design and run a pre-release customer program for a cool product from scratch; going to see the Foo Fighters with some customers (had to mention that one!). The list goes on. Whew! I guess the wine has made me somewhat sentimental (and wordy, apparently).
So, what's your job like? More "Barbara McClintock days" than "don't wanna go to work" days? Tell me! I want to hear about it.
