Although I'm already almost a month past NEO, I do hope I have wrote down what I have learned and thought about the whole orientation.

I was an intern at Microsoft during 2007 in the IT Op EAS (they've changed names like x^x times already..) managing all the B2B transactions, and help develop tools for the operation support team.

I remember during last year, the NEO was pretty interesting, but not the type of meeting that I think that I have to pay full attention at all times, because talking about company values, best representitive just doesn't ring too much for me that time. And the orientation only lasted for half of day including taking pictures.

However, this time back as an FTE, I remember when I saw that the orientation is going to take three full days I was shocked.

And when I arrived at the conference room I was even shocked, with almost 70-80 new employees onboarding the same time!

It feels more like an College orientation with so many people around you coming in fresh.

I remember the first day we write all our forms, and sit down at the conference room, I started to talk to people around me that are joining SQL, Visual Studio, Outlook, XNA, Zune, etc, It does feel amazing that you are around a diverse team of people together. It kinda burns your geek passion fire when there are so many geek power all together I guess? (joke)

To remember in short of what is in the NEO, we first get to know the main company values, the company vision and how the vision has evolved from just simply puting a computer in every room, to help reaching people's potential. To me it is quite interesting to think how us employees main goal is to actually helping others to reach their full potentials. The type of power and actually really understanding the people and how to reach that potential is going to be a huge challenge.

There is one interesting talk after the company values, that talks about the company's image. The host tells us to summarize what type of image we actually have that we heard from people. Well, for me personally, even people from UW which is closest campus from Microsoft refer them as the Evil empire, M$, copycat and bully.

On the slide where the host summarized, it actually put the real facts that people have mentioned, and ask us what was the cause and how we can bring a change into that image. I really like how we are sort of honest and sharing about the images that we precieve and see how we as representitives should live out the core values of the company. I think it's good enough for everyone that are new to each other for the first time.

When the host talks about benefits, I thought I would pay a lot of attention on it, but ended up falling asleep as it's almost just reading the paper they gave you in the package.

However, the most interesting talk, suprisingly is when the LCA team comes. The topics aren't that interesting, talking about Privacy, Law concerns in Microsoft. But the presenter really made the topics interesting, and shared some stupid mistakes microsofties made before. It was quite fun.

Overall, there are just too much to learn about the company it's just too hard to learn it even in three days. But what I enjoy the most of NEO is how you get to meet people all over, and although we going to have hard time to see each other since we're in different teams, I still contact people I meet in NEO and chat with their findings and thoughts about microsoft and the team. It's always good to network and get to have people to share things they've learned in different teams, because in Microsoft every team has their own standards, policy, culture and ways they do their job.

I cannot recall more of the NEO, but if I do remember any cool stuff I will come back and post them.