Microsoft is following the trend of many companies in having international development centers. In SQL, we've been doing this for awhile, but at a relatively small scale. Now, however, we are planning on increasing the size of our development teams in Hyderabad, Beijing and Shanghai.
If you've worked with cross-national development teams before, you know that it requires careful arrangement and some new management skills. One of the success factors that we've seen is making sure that each development organization has it's own charter: a product or component that is large enough, important enough, and separable enough to sustain commitment and growth for its own team.
Another critical success factor is getting the right people to "bridge" between teams. This means bi-lingual and bi-cultural. Some of our best successes have been with people who have worked at Redmond for a while before moving to one of our other officee --- and eventually, when the other offices have been around for longer, the reverse path (e.g. start in Shanghai, then move to Redmond as a "bridge") should work as well. Time at the "other" office builds personal networks and that irreplacible in-house knowledge about how things really work.
All of this means that people who have "bridge" skills today are in high demand. And building those bridge skills, no matter what your background, is a very viable career path. Your intent could be to move permanently to a new location, or to do it for a few years, or even to go back and forth over time.
If having one of those "bridge" careers---in any direction between Redmond and Hyderabad, Beijing or Shanghai---interests you, drop us a line.
SDET = Software Development Engineer in Test. It isn’t a common title in the industry, and the job that goes with it isn’t common either. The test teams at Microsoft build and run test suites to be sure, but it goes a lot further than that.
As an SDET, you learn deeply about your product and customers—quality isn’t about code coverage, it is about making sure our customer’s experience with our products is the best it can be. The SDET mantra is “what could go wrong?” SDETs participate in product design from the earliest stage, using what could go wrong to simplify confusing product behavior, avoid fragile designs, and build good diagnosis and recovery directly into the product. In the SQL BI teams, many SDETs work directly with beta customers to see what can go wrong, and get it fixed before the product ships.
And then there is the scale. Microsoft products ship on a huge variety of hardware and software platforms, often packaged in multiple ways. Test matrices explode. So we have built some of the largest build and test automation systems in the world. Some SDETs specialize in building innovation in those systems, and in other ways to automatically verify parts of the product. SDETs may write more code than the developers do.
The flip side of scale is impact. SQL Server is has the largest unit share of any database vendor: there are more people using this product for more purposes than any other. And SQL BI has been driving the growth, so our products are seeing more new customers every day than almost anywhere else in the company. Every product feature is used and every detail is magnified—we have to get it right. Towards the end of the ship cycle, the SQL test teams steer the ship, with their daily activities focused on finding those shipstopper bugs and getting them fixed before the release is in customer hands.
So SDET is a key role at Microsoft. What do we look for in an SDET? A background in QA is helpful, but not required. We are looking more for the fundamentals:
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A passion for quality, for getting it right. And the conviction and drive to achieve it.
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Detail oriented, with the ability to think through what could go wrong?
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Strong coding and debugging skills. Structured languages like C# or Java are useful. C++ even more so. But if you've developed your share of giant script libraries, we know good coding skills when we see them.
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Problem solving: how do we scale our automation systems and get better leverage out of our testing effort?
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Ability to handle and prioritize multiple projects simultaneously.
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Desire and ability to learn new products, new technologies, new customer scenarios.
And finally, a passion for our business—databases and business intelligence— is important. My team does ETL and so we care deeply about understanding multiple data systems, high-performance data processing, and user interfaces that are easy to use and productive. And we care about data warehousing, the most common environment we are used in. So while it is not necessary, experience with ETL, data warehousing or data centers in practice is a big plus for an SDET: there is nothing like being a customer to help us understand what getting it right should mean.
I hope this has given you a better idea of what being an SDET is like at Microsoft, and in SQL BI in particular. And if you haven’t before, I hope that you will consider signing up for the challenge of being an SDET. If you are the best, we’re hiring.
Here are some of the official job listings (we have multiple openings in each team):
Integration Services SDET posting.
Analysis Services SDET posting.
You can apply directly through those postings, or drop me a line.
Denise Draper / Product Unit Manager of SSIS Team / denised -at- microsoft.com
"We want you!" This is a shared blog to share information about the Microsoft SQL BI product teams, particularly geared at people who would like to join our teams, that is: you.
Expect to see articles highlighting teams, roles, projects and the local culture. This is an "official" site ---- the postings will always be from the teams that are recruiting. Of course, there is also http://www.microsoft.com/careers/, the official Microsoft career site that lists jobs throughout the company, but this blog will be a little more personal, giving you a more insight to the teams.
Microsoft SQL BI consists today of three teams: Integration Services, Analysis Services and Reporting Services, all of which ship as components of the SQL Server product.
- Integration Services (SSIS) is a full ETL product and data integration platform that can integrate data from any source. SSIS provides a scalable and extensible platform that empowers development teams to build, manage, and deploy integration solutions to meet unique integration needs.
- Analysis Services (AS) povides a unified and integrated view of all your business data as the foundation for all of your traditional reporting, OLAP analysis, Key Performance Indicator (KPI) scorecards and data mining. It is the market leader in OLAP today.
- Reporting Services (RS) a comprehensive, server-based reporting solution designed to help you author, manage, and deliver both paper-based and interactive Web-based reports. It is a leading reporting vendor on both SQL and non-SQL platforms.
Welcome, and expect to see more here soon.
Denise Draper / Product Unit Manager of SSIS Team
