In this series of blog posts, you will meet a Microsoft Premier Field Engineer (PFE) each day for a week. They have all been asked the same set of questions and responded quite uniquely, which is the way with PFEs.

Our first engineer is Grant Holliday who wrote the book on TFS. Seriously. You can buy the Professional Team Foundation Server 2010 book on Amazon  or pre-order his TFS 2012 book... and he's all ours.

The Elevator Pitch

Q: If you are on a client site and meet someone in an elevator who asks what you do for work, how would you describe yourself and your job?
A: I’m a Field Engineer for Microsoft. When customers have a TFS problem, I’m the guy they parachute in. I also do Health Checks to make sure that your servers are running smoothly, so that you don’t need me to parachute in.

Honey, I'm home

Q: When you get home from work and greet your partner, your pets or your children and they ask what you did today, what three points would you state as the highlights?
A: I helped this customer today with this gnarly TFS problem that I’ve never seen before.
 

The Urban Myth

Q: No job is perfect. What challenges you the most in your job and how do you overcome it to face and defeat that challenge another day?
A: The biggest challenge I have is the amount of travel. A trip now and then is great, but when it becomes the norm – that’s tough.
 

Hanging with the Gang

Q: What is it like to work with other PFEs and if you could change roles with another PFE in Canberra for a day, who would you be?
A: Like I said in my ‘So what does a PFE do anyway?’ post, these guys (and gals) are crazy smart. Everybody has their specialty, so I couldn’t really pick one.
 

Amnesia and Confusion

Q: How did you get to be a PFE?
A: Necessity. I am a deeply technical person who loves getting into the details of how things work. PFE was a perfect fit for me when I moved back to Australia.