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Anandi’s Thoughts

Random stuff (mostly) about working as a Program Manager at Microsoft
Just like the first day of school

I woke up this morning at 6:15 without an alarm and actually got out of bed and was ready for work by 7:15.  What's going on here? 

It's my first day of work at the new job! 

Now that I'm in Building 44, my commute to work has almost doubled.  It might actually be a little over 2 miles now.  :)  Since I got in so early I got a great parking spot, which is no small feat since parking is getting tight in most places on campus.  And just for a few days I get to camp out in an awesome window office while I wait for my stuff to be moved from Bldg 17.  At that point I'll be sharing an office with my job share partner, Rinki.

So here I am.  I've just installed Office OneNote 2007 so I can use it to take notes on all the reading I'm doing about Systems Management Server.  Rinki was kind enough to go through "the book" on SMS and mark which chapters were important for me to read.  Which amounts to a few hundred pages, not to mention the Concepts, Planning and Deployment Guide on the Microsoft SMS website.  So there will be a lot of reading, notetaking, and hopefully, learning going on over the next couple of weeks (months?).

I even managed to get invited to the morning "coffee run" with some of the other folks on the team.  I'm bad with names so now I have to surreptitiously peek at peoples' access badges since I think I've met most of the other PMs between this morning and the team outing last Friday.  Sad. 

So I'm hoping to get through the first few months' of cluelessness that comes with any new job as quickly as possible.  Do you have any tips on how to learn a new technology and team processes quickly?  

Posted: Monday, October 30, 2006 8:10 AM by anandi
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Comments

Marshall Harrison - "the gotspeech guy" said:

Great start for the first day on the new job.

As for getting started on new technologies I've always found that it helps to have contacts inside Microsoft. Probably not much help for you but you could do what I do and email Anshu. :-)

Or just read all the blogs/books etc you can find on the subject. I also spend lots of time in the debugger watching things as I step through applications.

Good luck.

# October 30, 2006 3:04 PM
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