During week 1 and 2, I set up a saved search on the internal site, and starting digging through the available jobs.  I’m looking at all software development engineer (SDE or dev) jobs in Redmond.  I’m looking for jobs that are at my level, 1 higher, or up to 2 lower.  Many times teams put their ideal level on the job posting, but are willing to consider higher/lower level people, within a small range.

There were ~52 jobs that matched my search criteria when I looked at the start of week 1.  I started going through the jobs, and putting ones that sounded interesting in my job cart.  When I was done with my first pass, I had ~20 jobs in my cart.  So I went through my cart again, and kept the jobs that really got me excited, and cut the ones that were just ok.  This was a difficult process for me, especially since the jobs I was most jazzed about were the ones I was probably least qualified for. 

I have a strong desire to work in the games industry.  I’ve been a computer gamer since my first IBM clone, back in the mid 80s and early 90s.  I got started with text-based adventure games like Zork, and Planetfall, before cutting my teeth on the Forgotten Realms RPGs.  Since my first semester of college, in 1999, I have wanted to work at a computer game studio.  The gaming industry is one that has the classic catch 22, though.  If you don’t have games experience, it’s hard to get a games dev job.  But you can’t get experience without getting a games dev job.  I’ll go into more detail on how to get around this problem in my next post.

So, after a couple of rounds of cuts, I had ~10 jobs in my cart, and I applied for the first 5.  Now we are going to come to the part of the process that I think is completely broken.  Resume submissions are done via email (like almost everything else at Microsoft).  The email you get tells you (the candidate) to look for other opportunities if you are not contacted ‘within a reasonable time’. 

This is the part that gets me.  Reasonable time for one hiring manager is 72 hours.  For others, it can be weeks, depending on whether they are buried in emails, trying to ship, or even on vacation.  I really think the process needs to be changed to provide a way for hiring managers to say they aren’t interested, without being embarrassed (on either side).  My solution would be an addition to the career site, where managers could respond to internal applications, and say ‘no thanks’ by simply checking a box and hitting submit.  As is, I have to wait quite a while before deciding that the manager just isn’t into my experience, then I have to go cancel my application, in order to apply somewhere else (remember the 5 at a time rule?).  But if the manager just happened to be on vacay, she gets an email saying I’m no longer interested in the position.  There’s no way to say ‘I still want the job, but haven’t heard from you’.

I got one negative response almost immediately.  The position had been filled, but the career site wasn’t updated yet.  So I applied for #6 right away.