Anandi’s Thoughts : new job

Don't do this in an interview. No, really.

anandi — Sat, 23 Aug 2008 07:30:00 GMT

I've conducted a lot of interviews lately, because we have some open positions on our team. And at my previous job, I was also involved in hiring and reviewed tons and tons of resumes from a Craigslist posting. I've done lots of phone screens and in-person interviews, including the infamous Microsoft multi-person all day interview extravaganzas.

Of course, there are dozens (hundreds?) of blogs and sites giving out career advice, and none of this is new. But people still keep doing it. So I figure it's worth getting the message out there. If this helps one techie person, my mission is accomplished.

1. Don't lie, but also present your best self.

Your resume is like an online dating profile. It's a snapshot of your career. It's meant to get the attention of the recruiter so they will call you. Just like you shouldn't say that you're 6 foot 3 if you're 5 foot 6, don't tell me you were the project manager of a $10 million project if you were the assistant to the PM. People will find out, and it won't be pretty. The world is a lot smaller than you think.

Don't tell me your life story on your resume. If you have less than 5 years of work experience, I don't want to see more than one page. I'm cool with two
pages if you have more than that. Don't be the dude with the 7 page boring resume in a teeny tiny font. I was afraid he might be as awful as his resume so I didn't call him.

Spellcheck. Seriously. F7, dude. And then ask your most grammarlicious friend to review it, too. 'Nuff said.

Also, if you're applying for a job as a software engineer, don't list your typing speed under your "top skills". It tells me you have no idea what's important.

Oh, and if you took one class 10 years ago in college in C++, but haven't used it since, don't say that you're an expert. This will come to light when
you're asked to answer a gnarly code problem on the whiteboard, and at that point, you're going to wish you were somewhere VERY far away.

2. Don't be late. Or flaky.

This one is easy, and obvious, right? Your recruiter sets up a time for an interview. Be there, and be mentally present, without distractions.

But it's amazing how many people just don't think about it. If you don't have someone to watch your crying baby, or you are in the middle of painting your
house, don't choose those times for an interview. Oh, and I am a serious dog lover, but put your barky dog outside before your interview. He's going to
distract both you and me, and I'm gonna wonder why you can't sort out details like making sure your environment is ideal for the task at hand.

Before that interview, find out EVERYTHING. Is it by phone, LiveMeeting, or in-person? If you give out your mobile number for a phone interview, will you
have reliable reception? What should you wear and where should you park? Don't be the gal who showed up at the office for a phone interview. Awkward and icky for both of us.

Don't assume you'll sort it out when you get there, because it'll make you late, and possibly frazzled.

3. Don't be soul-suckingly negative.

Again, blindingly obvious, right? Don't spend whole minutes talking about how your last job sucked, or that your last boss was a tyrant, and can I believe what they made you do?? I'm not your best friend at happy hour, so save the sad story for her.

If you get asked why you left, come up with a simple answer that doesn't sound evasive. Something about how it wasn't a good fit for your career goals, or the company was downsizing and your whole department got cut.

Be honest and to the point if you're asked if you were fired, let go, or left voluntarily. Don't dwell on it or give me the long painful backstory.
If you start doing that, I'm rolling my eyes and trying to figure out how to end this interview as quickly as possible. Because no one wants to work with *that* guy who blames everything on everyone else.

4. Don't get all Paris Hilton on me and make it all about you.

I'm all for asking smart questions during the interview. I pay attention when someone asks me well-thought-out questions about the work environment, job duties, or team culture.

But, if on our first phone screen, you're asking me how much you're going to get paid, whether you'll have to work overtime, how many vacation days you'll get, and if you'll have your own office, it makes me think you're gonna be high maintenance. And it's way better not to hire the divas in the first place, than to get rid of divas later.

If you get an offer, you can ask all of those questions later. That's when you have more power anyway - the company obviously wants you, and you can negotiate what you need to.

Tangentially related to this one: Don't go on and on about how you're the best coder or project manager there is. Really? The best ever? In the whole wide world? If you're so great, why are you applying for a job? Shouldn't the perfect one just fall into your lap?

And don't cut other people or technologies down to make yourself look awesome. It just makes you look like an idiot.

Because I'm ornery, this is a list of 4, not the usual Top 5 list. I am lucky to have smart career-oriented parents, and a fair amount of experience as an
interviewee, plus I like to be obsessively prepared about these things so I've read a lot of interview prep materials. Kidding aside, I really do hope this helps someone out.

What else would *you* add to this list? I'm sure folks out there have some good stories/tips.

Where did that five years go?

anandi — Sun, 17 Aug 2008 22:51:00 GMT

Work has been pretty hectic for the past few weeks (months?), what with coming back to a new role, and some major deadlines. It didn't leave much time for frivolous activities like blogging. But now I'm back and I'll try to post at least weekly, because I know how disappointing it is to return to a blog to see the last post was months ago. It's like showing up to your favorite restaurant and finding out all that's left is a vacant lot.

My new role is on the Windows Server team, working as a project manager on the Protocol Engineering Team. We're the team who produces the Open Protocol Specifications out on MSDN. I've been on the team since mid-May, and I am really excited to be here. It's a great bunch of people, smart and motivated, and so I feel like I've chosen well. (Always a good feeling when you're fairly new to a job!)

So one of the cool things about Microsoft is that they don't make you feel totally awful for leaving the company and coming back, and so they just "restart the clock" when you return. Last year I left just a few months shy of my fifth anniversary with the company. We had a team meeting this past week, and my manager surprised me with my five year service award glass thingy. It's a few weeks early, but I am so excited about it! Here's a sample picture of one of these things: (Don't read too carefully, cuz I am not John Smith.)

Anyway, it's got my name engraved on it, which is totally cool. Growing up with an unusual name has made me obsessed with personalized things because I could never find any of those little gift shop trinkets with my name on it, when I was a kid.

So the award is sitting in its place of honor on my office window ledge and it makes pretty colors in my office when the sun shines through it :) But more importantly, I am thrilled to have been with Microsoft for that long, and unless we win the lottery or something, hope to collect a couple more of these glass things before I'm done.

Hello again!

anandi — Fri, 16 May 2008 03:36:00 GMT

Hmm, so that was a quick detour. I'm back at Microsoft, as a Sr. Program Manager in the Server and Tools Division, and hope to continue blogging here. I just started this week, though, so I haven't really discussed it with my new manager yet.

But I just thought I'd write a quick post to say hi, and see who might be out there reading still...

It's getting better every day

anandi — Wed, 14 Feb 2007 03:59:00 GMT

Marshall, who I met through the Speech Server TAP program, has bugged me about my dormant blog a few times now, so here I am with a new post for you. It's embarassing how long it's been since I last posted. Especially since I include a link to this blog in my email signature. And we all know how much email Microsofties send every day. It's amazing.

So here I am, about 3.5 months into my "new" job as an SDK PM for System Center Configuration Manager 2007. Reading over my old posts from my early days on the job has made me realize just how much I have learned in the past few months. It's never as fast as I would like, but really, I'm pretty happy with how far I've gotten.

I wrote my first spec, for the Setup portion of the SDK. Not glamorous but it needed to be done so our Setup developer could build us a Windows Installer package to install the documentation and code samples that make up the SDK. Today I filled out the request form for our legal team to prepare our End User License Agreement (again, a less than thrilling job that's all part of the random stuff Program Managers do) and I realized that I could fill out the entire form, with only one question for Rinki, my job-share partner. Small victories, but they're good reassurance that I'm making progress, and I actually feel like I'm truly useful now.

Working part time is also going well. We have a teamwide policy of no meetings on alternate Fridays, which results in all Fridays being pretty light on meetings. So I don't seem to miss much by not being around on Fridays. I've been somewhat flexible with my schedule so if there's an important meeting on a Thursday, I'll come in for it, unless I'm out of town. This team is also very respectful and accepting of the flex work thing - I've gotten no snide comments about working part time or being less committed to my job. In fact, most people I talk to want to know how they can work part time too, until they realize it also comes with a pay cut. :D

So far, so good. What's going on out there? Or have I managed to drive away all my readers by posting so infrequently?

So much to learn, so little time

anandi — Tue, 12 Dec 2006 04:47:00 GMT

Our Thanksgiving trip to Tucson was very nice. My husband and I drove back to Seattle, which I had anticipated to be a nice leisurely drive, but turned into a "let's just get home", boring freeway, 12-15 hours a day sort of road trip. On the bright side, we did manage to hit In-N-Out Burger for lunch one day, and saw some friends in the Bay Area.

We're coming up to a pretty quiet time at work. A lot of folks are forced to take vacation or else they'll lose it. Microsoft will let you carry over a year's worth of vacation. It's surprising to me how many people don't take all of their vacation and thus run the risk of losing some at the end of the year. Maybe that means I'm a slacker. I've got just a few days of vacation left this year. (And I don't mean that those are the days I'll forfeit - that's actually all I have to carry over.)

Now I'm starting to dig into some real work and feeling a little less useless. I wouldn't go so far as to say I'm adding huge value to the team, but I'm definitely moving out of "just learning" mode. Slowly. I'm putting together a "Vision and Scope" document for a project I've been given and working with the User Assistance (UA) guys, learning about their tools and processes and what we've done in the past for the SMS SDK.

I often wish I could fast-forward to be 6 or 9 months into the job, at that point where I'm clear about what I'm doing, confident enough to speak up at meetings, and just generally feeling like I have it together. Now I've just got this nagging stressed out feeling that I'm picking things up too slow and not working hard enough (doesn't help that I'm here only 3 days a week). I suppose those are just normal things that happen with joining a new team, as well as starting a part time schedule.

At some point in the not too distant future, I hope to post about our upcoming SDK for System Center Configuration Manager 2007. I've got a list of features that I'm responsible for in the SDK docs and code samples so I'm trying to come up to speed on the biggest one: software distribution. It's a great place to start since it's the heart of SMS. That also makes it huge and complicated but that's sure better than being bored.

So, does anyone out there have any thoughts about the SMS SDK? Have you downloaded it from the Microsoft Download Center?

Happy Thanksgiving everyone!

anandi — Tue, 21 Nov 2006 00:52:00 GMT

I am just getting ready to leave the office to take care of some last minute items before leaving for Tucson early tomorrow. I thought I'd write a quick blog post since it's been a few weeks since the last one.

I'm slowing ramping up on SMS 2003, and also understanding what's going to be in SCCM 2007. It's going better than I expected but of course, I'd prefer the knowledge and understanding to be instantly uploaded into my brain, rather than over a period of months...

I got my desktop system all set up today (finally!). I installed Vista and Office 2007 on it. After a few hiccups, I got connected to the domain. Apparently somehow the network install from MS IT joined me to a workgroup, so I could only get to certain things on the network. Props to me for figuring out by myself what the problem was. Those Win 2000 MCSE classes sure do pay off at random times.

This is the first time I've used Vista, and wow are the graphics impressive. There's a small learning curve associated with finding stuff, not quite as bad as the move from Win2000 to XP, but still noticeable. My very early impression of Vista is that it's just so *pretty*.

And IE 7, which is included with Vista, is also very different. I haven't used it enough to comment on the features yet but having tabs available for pages is really cool. (Yes, I know Firefox already had that. I don't use Firefox so it's new to me.)

I played around (for way too long) last night with Ed Holloway's Ink Blog plug-in for Windows Live Writer. I got it to work on my personal blog, so I think I might try it out occasionally here too. It lets you blog using the handwriting feature on a Tablet PC. Too cool. I've been wondering how to do that for a while, and just ran across this tool in an Internet search.

So I guess the subtitle of this post is "cool technology that I'm thankful for". Have a Happy Thanksgiving, and enjoy your time off!

It's my Friday

anandi — Thu, 02 Nov 2006 02:33:00 GMT

Well, I'm at the end of my last day of work for the week. So far, this part time thing is working out great :)

So what did I accomplish this week? Met a bunch of people on the team (super-important for a PM), got through a few modules of an online training course for SMS 2003, read a few more chapters of The Book and the CPD Guide, looked at a bunch of documents on how our team's processes work, went to a few meetings and got my office partially set up. Not bad for 3 days.

The thing I am most excited about is that my "studying" is already paying off. I went to a meeting where some design changes were being discussed and for several of the items I could actually follow the discussion. This was very encouraging to me, as it usually takes me a few weeks to get to that point where the jargon and acronyms start making sense. I guess I'm finally getting enough experience to see that most software projects are very similar and there are consistent "themes" in all the products I've worked on here at Microsoft.

I do have one meeting to attend tomorrow - a lot of "getting started" information about the SMS SDK. I'll be attending by phone since Thursday is one of my days off, but since the subject matter is important to me, I'm not too worried about it. Plus I can attend in my PJs, with sleeping dogs on the floor next to me, and no one will be any wiser. (unless they've read this blog, of course!)

So who's actually reading this? Anyone? Bueller? Bueller? Leave me a comment to let me know this isn't going off into the great Internet Recycle Bin!!

Day 2 of new job

anandi — Wed, 01 Nov 2006 01:29:00 GMT

I guess it's pretty clear that I'm just getting settled into my new job, since I've actually had time to post to my blog two days in a row! Late yesterday, my stuff got moved over from Bldg 17, so my office-mate/job-share partner and I tried to figure out how to get all this stuff to fit comfortably in our shared office. This is the first time I've had to share an office at Microsoft, so it's a little weird. By nature I'm a quiet, private person, and get distracted with a lot of background noise.

Fortunately, my officemate Rinki isn't very loud, and I need to ask her a lot of questions while I'm ramping up, so this works out well. The other bonus is that 2 days a week she has the office to herself since I don't work on Thursdays and Fridays. And she leaves early each day, so after 2:30 on my work days, the office is all mine. So really, this sharing thing isn't bad at all, and I do realize I'm still incredibly lucky to have a workspace with an actual door that closes. As a consultant, I always got squeezed into cubes, random conference rooms, or whatever available open space was available, so I'm definitely not complaining too much now.

My manager sent out the introductory e-mail about me today so various people have been dropping by the office and introducing themselves, which is nice. And I've had lunch both days with Rinki and others on the team so I'm not too lonely.

When I went back to Bldg 17 to make sure everything was in order for the office move, I felt a little bit sad. After all, I knew everyone there, knew exactly what I was supposed to do, how the team worked, etc. Starting out in a new job is always tough - the ambiguity and feeling of complete confusion in the beginning is so hard to deal with! A wise friend once told me that you have to give it 3 months before you can really evaluate how things are going. To be more precise, her statement was "Any new job sucks for the first three months", just because there's so much to learn.

Today I completed the first module of a multi-media SMS 2003 training course, got my office sort of set up, am working my way through another overview doc, and am currently copying a Virtual Server image of SMS to my machine so I can play around with it. It's slow going, but I can only go up from here, right?

Just like the first day of school

anandi — Mon, 30 Oct 2006 18:10:00 GMT

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?

Soon to be a Personal Program Manager, too!

anandi — Tue, 24 Oct 2006 23:32:00 GMT

I guess I'm on the "every other month" posting schedule here. Maybe that's just the natural rhythm of things and I shouldn't feel bad about it. Then again, just this week, two of my TAP partners asked me if I was planning to blog more often. And the answer is, yes, I'm *planning* to blog more often, but the reality just doesn't quite work out that way.

So what am I busy with this week? Well, for starters, I am transitioning all of my duties to a few other people on my team. That's right, folks, I am moving on to another team at Microsoft. While I *love* managing the Speech Server TAP program, it hasn't been great for the work/life balance side of things. That wasn't really Microsoft's fault as much as my own. I need some time to focus on some personal stuff (like the 25+ pounds I've gained since my wedding last May - where the heck did that come from???).

For the past few months I've been fantasizing about what it would be like if I had a long weekend every week. I envied the few friends I have who are working part time (mostly due to new babies) or have taken significant time off from working altogether. And then it occurred to me: I could change my work schedule if I wanted to.

I was raised to always focus on education, so I could get that great job to pay for all my material needs, and work hard there to advance through the company and make more money, to secure mine and my (hypothetical) childrens' futures. So I worked hard in 16+ years of school, and 7+ years of working in the technology industry. Don't get me wrong, it's definitely paid off. I'm happy with my success, my house, and the new car I was able to buy. I don't think too hard about buying that $3 chai latte at Starbucks or a new pair of cute unnecessary shoes every few months. And in general, people seem to like the work that I do, so that's good.

So it was a little weird for me to think about cutting back, both on my career trajectory and on my salary itself. I'm the typical geeky overachiever. I expect to get As in all my classes, and to do everything as perfectly as I can, and always have my eye on that next promotion, etc.

But you know what? When I really thought about what *I* want, it's simple. More time to myself. A job that I love, just from the day to day perspective. I don't really *want* to be a VP, and I definitely don't enjoy playing the "game" to get more visibility, toot my own horn, etc. Obviously, I need to make enough money to pay the bills and save for later, and still buy the occasional pair of cute unnecessary shoes. But really, that's not much.

So I had a serious discussion with my husband a few months ago about hypothetically working part time and how that would impact our financial situation. We've been incredibly lucky/blessed so it turns out we'll be just fine even if I scale back. I'll need to make fewer trips to Starbucks, and we'll need to eat at home more often (which is better for us anyway), but those small things are worth me getting a couple of days a week back to myself.

In typical overachiever style, I've already got a list of what I want to do with those extra 2 days a week. Lots of home organization projects, sorting out the remodel of our living room, and finally getting to the gym 5 days a week like I should. Not to mention adventurous outings around Seattle with my 2 dogs. And I will learn how to be more "wifely", you know, like cooking meals, learning how to sew buttons back on to shirts, and stuff :)

So starting next week, I'll be taking a new job on the System Center Configuration Manager (product formerly known as Systems Management Server, or SMS) team, as half of a jobsharing arrangement. Two of us will be Program Managers for the SDK. Besides being able to work part-time, I'm really excited about the role itself. It's the most technical position I've had at Microsoft. Which means I'll get to learn a bunch of new stuff and increase my geek quotient even more. Woo hoo.

But it's always sad to leave a job that has been so good to me. I'll miss my teammates on the Unified Communications Application Server team (formerly known as MSS). I regret not being around until we ship our product but I'm glad I got to be a part of the process. The good thing is that I'll get to see everyone at the Holiday Party since my husband is on the same team.

I'd like to give a huge, heartfelt THANK YOU to all of my TAP partners who made the last year the most fun of my entire career. You guys are a great bunch of partners and customers and I hope you'll keep in touch. I'll buy you a fancy Starbucks coffee when you come to Redmond, so definitely take me up on that, ok?

And yes, Marshall, I will try to blog more often on the new team, thanks for the encouragement.