First day at Microsoft
Well, today was my first day as an MS employee :)
My email address is addys@microsoft.com if anyone wants to know. Today was spent mostly on my NEO (New Employee Orientation) and getting set up with hardware, network access, etc. My thoughts so far:
1. I was very impressed by the organization of the NEO. We got hundreds of pages of printed material, overviews of everything we needed to know, clear instructions on what processes we would be going through. These people have obviously invested quite a bit of thought on not only what new employees need to know, but what is the best way to make all that information digestible.
2. The NEO participants were unusually diverse - a larger percent of women than I'm used to seeing in tech firms, and also people of every imaginable age and nationality. The women might have all been secretaries though ;) Just kidding! Everyone agrees that diversity is a good thing, it is nice to see Microsoft taking it a step further than most companies do.
3. The Microsoft campus is beautiful, everyone around is very smart, motivated, bla bla bla yadda yadda... you heard it all before. It's all true though.
4. A fellow newbie commented that there are about 20 brands of free soda in both regular and diet flavors, but no water. Go figure.
5. The fact that I had a previous email account with MS (even though I wasn't an employee) seems to have complicated things a bit, so I won't have full network access for a few more days.
6. The picture on my MS employee badge could easily have come from here.
