I posted an article recently entitled "The Managed Languages Team is Hiring", and the response I received was nigh overwhelming. Dozens of resumes and CVs from industry professionals, researchers and students poured in. It was very gratifying, and I was excited to get so many great leads.

I collected up all of those resumes for sorting by our hiring managers, only to be told that it had come down from on high mere hours before that no, actually, we've now met our hiring goals. We've been instructed to fill up any additional positions that come open due to attrition, but do not grow the teams to be larger; after a long recruiting push we have enough people to meet our goals for the next round of languages and tools for .NET.

I therefore want to apologize to all of you who sent me resumes and wrote great cover letters, some of them quite long, heartfelt and interesting. I know that you put work into them, and appreciate that. Obviously I would never have gotten your (and my!) hopes up had I known that in fact the strong push that I'd been getting from management to find more candidates was about to suddenly be reversed.

I do not mean for a moment to be discouraging about working at Microsoft; the company as a whole still has a great many positions available. And it is not like we are just going to throw all those resumes away; leads are valuable. The ones from college students will be sent on to our college recruiting specialists, and so on. But if you want a job at Microsoft, your best bet is still to look at our career site and apply for specific positions.

And finally, a great many people asked me whether we hire foreign nationals for our development center in the United States. Given that I am Canadian and I work directly with people from India, China, Israel, Denmark and a great many other places, it seems we have done in the past.

I asked our human resources staffing consultant about the present situation, and she said that we at present have no legal difficulty hiring people from Canada, Mexico, Chile, Singapore and Australia. It is somewhat difficult to hire foreign nationals from other countries at the moment because federal law limits the number of visas we can obtain and they are running short. However, apparently there will be more visas available in October.

Obviously I am not an expert in immigration law; if you have further questions about the supply and demand for visas, I suggest that you take it up with an immigration lawyer, or find a conveniently located member of the House of Representatives or Senate and ask them what the situation is and how it got that way.

And finally, of course Redmond is not the only place where Microsoft has development centers. We have dev work going on internationally in Bejing, Copenhagen, Cairo, Aachen, Hyderabad, Dublin, Herzelia, Haifa, Zurich and Cambridge, and other subsidiaries pretty much everywhere for non-development work.