Steven Sinofsky's Microsoft TechTalk : Experiences @ Microsoft

Interns -- the intern experience in Office

steven_sinofsky — Fri, 24 Feb 2006 01:00:00 GMT

We’re actively hiring interns from the college campuses we visit. I wanted to use this as an opportunity to talk about what it is like to be an intern in Office.

You can read about the specifics of the intern program on the intern web site: http://www.microsoft.com/college/ip_overview.mspx. You can read about the job types available (SDE, SDET, PM) on the product groups as well as the structure of the internship (12 weeks min), and the benefits (endless fun). I’m going to focus on the part I like the most which is the work you get to do on Office.

First and foremost, as an intern you are considered a regular member of the team from the day you start. There is a lot of opportunity to learn and of course we don’t expect you to be proficient in your discipline at a commercial level when you show up. In fact the point of the summer is to offer you the opportunity to rapidly learn the skills necessary to write code, test products, or design features at a commercial scale for 400 million customers around the world. My goal for all the interns is to work on something that customers will see when Office12 ships. So whether you are an SDE, SDET, or PM we structure our projects so you have the opportunity to contribute to something broadly used.

I would emphasize “opportunity” because a big part of the internship is offering you the opportunity. Microsoft has always offered a place where if you have the skills and abilities your work has an opportunity to shine. What we ask for the opportunity is hard work, an open mind, and a commitment to the project. Being an intern in Office is not easy, and it certainly isn’t a summer vacation. In fact, some students are a bit surprised at the challenges at contributing software to such a broadly used product. It is a lot different than working on an assignment at school, that’s for sure. Some of the big differences:

Tools and techniques – building software (whether on a PC or on a server) for a broad set of customers requires a different set of tools and techniques. You are likely to be using tools such as Visual Studio and the .NET framework designed to work with large numbers of developers on big projects. So you will spend some time getting up to speed on C#, C++, etc. if you do not already know them—don’t worry you don’t need to know them. We also of course have a group internally that trains on these tools and offers courses in these and all sorts of other areas which you can tap into.

Security, Privacy, and Quality in general – perhaps the biggest difference between commercial software at scale and other projects is the need for all of the factors that customers expect under the umbrella of quality. This means you will spend a lot of time designing in, coding, or validating these needs of the product. You will spend way more time on this than you have spent previously on non-commercial products.

Performance – performance (speed, memory usage) are key to commercial code. All that stuff you learned in algorithms will matter a ton. You will need to consider your design in the context of a large system so you will not have the freedom to use a ton of resources on just your part of the world.

Iteration – The biggest difference I always think is that you will spend more time on one area than you would in a course. You will spend time iterating on the design, test plan, or code because getting it right is the goal.

Scale – Perhaps the biggest contrast to coursework is going to be the scale of working on software like Office. As described before, while in theory it is cool if you can make a few billion dollars with a group of 20 people, in practice this hasn’t proven to be the case. Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, and others are all very big companies. In fact we are at the point where most of us have a number of developers that pretty much feels the same—once you get past about 1500 or 2000 developers it is tough to tell the difference, which is why Microsoft feels the same to me now as it did when I started (the company was a total of 3,500). By the way, don’t get confused by the numbers you read about the size of a company overall. Microsoft in particular (among those) has a large global sales force which requires a lot of corporate infrastructure outside of “developers”. For what it is worth, the team that creates all of the Microsoft Office Professional code fits in building 36 (and some in Mountain View!) and the number of developers is in the mid 100’s.

Mentorship – and finally an important part of working in a commercial setting, and perhaps the biggest learning opportunity as an intern, is getting to work closely with an experienced member of the team. You will have daily contact with your “mentor” and you will frequently interact with your group manager. I would add that I will definitely be on the lookout for cool projects and might drop by your office for a quick demo when you’re not expecting it :-)

Leaving out all the details of the cool furnished apartments and stuff, your internship will start with an orientation that all interns receive—you learn about all the benefits, meet lots of other interns, and get the scoop on the summer event schedule (activities, parties, outings, etc.). Shortly after that you’ll head over to your office. Interns work in the same offices that full time employees do though generally, just like in college, you’ll share an office with another intern. You’ll get all your hardware and spend some time getting your @microsoft.com email address and the like.

Next up you will start to talk about your project and what the summer holds for you. Things will move pretty quickly since you only have two weeks. Your mentor has written up your project plan—the plan will outline resources, objectives, and explain the overall project to you. Of course this is just the start and your own view of things will contribute greatly to how the project plays out. You will probably spend the next day or two getting oriented around the code, tools, and finding the drinks and cafeteria.

You will work with your mentor pretty consistently. You’ll begin to get a handle on the project, but you’ll have a ton of questions and you will start learning right away. You’ll see the amazing stuff that goes into building a product like Office. You can head over to the labs where we have all the hardware that builds and tests Office if you want to get a real sense of things. If you are in program management you might spend some time in the usability labs or in focus groups/field studies.

Specifically for Office 2007 we are going to be at a super exciting time as a team because we’re heading into the final phases of the project. You will have an opportunity to be on the inside of a super important project. Because we’re winding up, in all likelihood you will be working on forward-looking projects helping us to define the next product. You might work on an area that we are going to release on the web or put in the first post-release service pack. Or you might actually get to work on the final phases of 2007. It all depends on the project and a little bit on your job. If you are an SDE or PM, there is a good chance you will work on future work, which is appropriate since many on the team will be doing the same. If you are an SDET you will want to join up with the full-time SDETs who are focused on the 2007 quality issues—performance, security, etc. In all cases, there is a ton of cool stuff we’ll be working on.

Since you are a full fledged member of the team you will also participate in all the team activities—events outside of work or team meetings and the other things that go on as we build Office. There will be a lot of neat stuff to see in action—how we release the products, how our OfficeOnline web site works, how customers are using the beta release, etc. Team meetings are all about keeping up to date on that sort of information.

Let’s fast forward to the end of the summer—your project is rocking, you did way more than you were supposed to, and in general had a great time. The final thing we ask of all interns is to present their work to the team and to the corporate VP of your group. This is the most fun for me since I try to go to as many of these as I can. You’ll find a very receptive and supportive audience. This is an important part of your experience because in the corporate environment you are often called upon to present your work and undergo a peer review ;-)

The work is challenging—there is no doubt about that. It is not a vacation since you are contributing real code to products customers will pay real money to use. The stakes are high so we will take the work seriously. In exchange you’ll have an experience that is pretty close to real world. We don’t try to dress it up and we don’t hide the hard parts. Sure there is the party at the Chairman’s house and more stuff planned and scheduled than you can imagine, but the work is real!

I should also mention the opportunity you have to learn about the rest of Microsoft and things like Microsoft Research (MSR). Throughout the summer there are open talks by leading researchers and guest speakers of all sorts invited by MSR. These are streamed to your desk or you can head over in person. In addition, each week there is a “tech talk” (where the name of this blog came from) from a product group VP who offers up a view from their product/area (and in my case, a bunch of cool free stuff if you know how to work the system!)

I hope to see you at the tech talk this summer!

--Steven

congratulations Will -- final project presentation

steven_sinofsky — Wed, 24 Aug 2005 02:44:00 GMT

Today Will, one of our interns from the Boston area did a demo of his summer's project. He did a great job and the project ended up quite good.

He had a lot to learn this summer as he had to wrap himself around Office "12" and learn the ins and outs of the *new* SharePoint, InfoPath, and some new technologies from Windows Server and integrate those. I wish I could share more but we're just not public with the features yet. Suffice it to say, Will's work will be important features in Office "12" and will definitely make the flow of work around corporations go much more smoothley when using the Office "12" platform.

Here's a photo from Will's presentation out on my MSN Space. His mentor is on the left and on the right is the dev manager for the group (who happened to go to the same school and was once an intern way back).

Way to go Will!

--Steven

Intern culture -- two great video examples

steven_sinofsky — Tue, 23 Aug 2005 06:51:00 GMT

Just wanted to point folks to two great views of intern culture caught on video.

On Channel9 you can find interviews with a bunch of interns in real-world discussion.

On iFilm, a group of interns chose to document their summer by creating a most unique music video.

I'm already starting to miss our interns. The good news is we'll have more next year and a lot of folks are excited to receive offers for full time jobs at Microsoft after they graduate and we're super happy to see them join the team!

--Steven

Intern last days: cool projects and fun photos

steven_sinofsky — Mon, 15 Aug 2005 04:24:00 GMT

The interns are starting to return back to school. We had an amazing group of interns this year from over 50 different schools. About half are going to be seniors and the other half are going to be juniors or sophomores.

The projects folks work on are totally mainstream work. When Office “12” ships our interns will be able to point to the product and tell their friends and families that they worked on design, development, testing of the real features that contributed to the product. I wish I could share more about the specifics of Office “12” but folks will have to wait until at least the PDC for that J (see http://www.microsoft.com/pdc).

I’ve posted a couple of final days photos of some interns on our team.

Andy is an intern from an southern state university. He worked this summer as a software design engineer/test intern on the test infrastructure of Office “12” and I think he had a great summer. Andy took a liking to the free Welch’s Cranberry juice and created a large grid of used cans in his office.!

Will is an intern from a private college in the northeast. He worked this summer as a software design engineer on some of our server features related to workflow. He did a great job. He has a couple of more weeks so I’ll see a demo of his shipping features soon. Will along with a couple of other interns and a new hire participated in a speed-eating contest on Friday – the goal was to consume a whole box of those nasty fake chocolate eggs. I’m a low-carb person so I skipped the contest!

Check out the photos on http://spaces.msn.com/members/sinofsky/PersonalSpace.aspx?_c01_photoalbum=showdefault&_c02_owner=1&_c=photoalbum

See you soon,

Steven

Tracking code "churn" -- cool intern project

steven_sinofsky — Thu, 04 Aug 2005 21:37:00 GMT

Our interns are wrapping up over the next few weeks. The projects that interns work on are critical parts of shipping Office and this year is no exception. We’ve had our interns hard at work on getting ready for beta this fall. A big part of the internship is putting a bow around your project and showing the work off to the broad team you are part of. I just finished seeing a presentation of an intern in Software Test Engineering.

One of the challenges in talking about intern projects is finding a baseline comparison because it is easy to read projects and think “oh man that is not important or big”. For example, in college your projects are “write a SQL database”—of course it takes years before you learn how complex it is to write a real™ database. Or at the other end of the spectrum you get “hype” around how you can add one feature to a web site that millions see. Of course what we always here from interns that have worked in other companies is how much responsibility folks get. One intern told me this year “I was here just a month and people were coming and asking me questions!”

The project is super important to us and we haven’t quite figured out the best way to approach this. An intern offered us a great chance for a new set of eyes to look at the work and contribute to our development. In this case we have been working on ways to track “code churn” – while this is an age old topic in many ways, the complexity of our code base and the level of sophistication in the code make this a tricky assessment. Looking at metrics like KLOCs definitely offer some data, but not much information. We have a number of very high end tools that we have used that were developed in cooperation with the Microsoft Research team (see http://www.microsoft.com/windows/cse/pa/pa.mspx). What we asked this intern to do was using the tools available, create a process and product that allows us to measure code churn in a reliable and meaningful manner. All along of course the intern has all the resources of the team, including a mentor who is a senior member of our organization.

At the start there is a project plan that the mentor writes that looks a lot like a semester project at school. As another intern reminded us, the biggest difference is that our projects have lots of potential answers and the path is not worked out—you really need to develop your own specification and have that validated by your peers before you begin. The project plan looked like the following:

Objectives

Develop a tool which can be used to collect and store block churn data between two specified builds.
Create a front-end reporting tool that reports total blocks and impacted blocks across checkpoints in a table.
Apply Function Level Ownership data such that an owner is recorded for each function that has changed.
Front-end reports data in graphical format.

There is a lot in there. In fact the first objective first requires one to develop a notion of what churn really constitutes. So in the final presentation the intern went through a thorough analysis of what churn would look like and how to measure it. It was quite interesting and was definitely unique work.

The next step was to take that tool and hook it into our existing tools we use to display project information. The basic idea is to connect up the information we have on blocks of code to the developers and more importantly the testers that own the code. That way we know which blocks have changed a ton and we can focus our testing efforts there.

Then of course there is a cool graphical display using Microsoft Reporting Services to make this really easy.

The project was super interesting. We’re going to be using this information to understand where to focus our testing efforts in Office12. We will also be applying this methodology to previous releases of Office so we can look at comparisons over long periods of time. This will help us in a big meeting we’re having with BillG on “engineering excellence” this fall.

Congratulations and well done!

--Steven

PS: I've been tracking the aggregate views on posts and it seems to take about a week for the views to peak so that looks like for the summer the frequency I will use.

On juggling, unicycles, and jousting

steven_sinofsky — Sat, 30 Jul 2005 05:22:00 GMT

BusinessWeek has an article this week about the hiring binge at some companies in the bay area are doing (ok, Yahoo! and Google). The article raises a number of the standard “new high-tech hiring” clichés that are worth talking about because they seem to repeat themselves.

Let’s go back to 1989 – The Seattle Times Sunday Magazine ran an article the “Velvet Sweatshop” (some proud Microsoft people all got sweatshirts with that silkscreen – this was before zazzle when getting silk screening was a long lead analog process). The article was sent to me by my recruiter as I was about to make the trip from graduate school to start at Microsoft. The article was magic for me. It told the story of how employees work hard, work on great new technologies, and have a great time doing so. The article was my first exposure to some of the classics in “high tech employee” photos including of course people juggling and people riding unicycles, and of course the ever popular people riding unicycles re-enacting medieval jousting. But suffice it to say the article resonated with me (and scared my parents terribly since everyone had really long hair and wore flannel shirts even in the summer). Except for the 1983 Time magazine Machine of the Year article and the Microsoft Press Book, Programmers At Work, for me this article represented the best coverage of the programming culture I had seen to date (Steven Levy’s book Hackers later captured the spirit brilliantly).

Yet I have to admit, I’ve never actually seen programmers juggle, ride unicycles, or even joust. I have seen my share of golf in the hallways, filling offices with packing peanuts, and of course laser tag and water guns (all of these this summer at Microsoft!). That is to say, you probably can’t take literally what you read and at the same time the environment of fresh from college programmers has been pretty much the same, perhaps expressed differently, for at least the past 16 years that I know. It just seems that every new company generates the same “new” story about college grads joining computer companies.

Of course there is an element of one-upmanship that comes from these articles as companies try to portray their interpretation of the new-hire culture as unique. That's the marketing -- these articles are not spontaneous but come from PR efforts.

The one common thread among companies that hire lots of people new from college is that it is the very presence of a bunch of people of the same age, motivation, skills, and general attitude that yield the culture and not the company itself. The company provides the higher level goals (and the money to support the stuff) and chooses what aspects to reinforce. It was incredibly cool when I showed up at Microsoft—I was 23 years old and ready to go to work. I had no friends in Seattle. My family was 3000 miles away. I lived in an apartment within walking distance from Microsoft that had a pool where beautiful people hung out. I had disposable income for the first time in my life. I was ready to be one of those cool people on Melrose Place, except I quickly found out that the work at Microsoft was way cooler than sitting by the pool. I never got around to buying much furniture (Seattle now has an IKEA) and certainly didn’t get that Webber BBQ I wanted. But man, I wrote a bunch of code and learned more in 6 months than I learned in two years of graduate school—hardware breakpoints, real mode v. protect mode, real-world code generation, USER/KERNEL/GDI, Microsoft’s cool internal compiler and tools. It was amazing. (not to limit things to the past, this week was filled with just as many learning experiences for me personally).

When I talk with our new hires this summer what they describe is *exactly* what I experienced, except they all have broadband at home so they can work even if they get woken up in the middle of the night by that party upstairs. I had to dial in and read my email over 1200b CrossTalk.

I became friends with the people I work with. We would go out to dinner then return to work. We would see movies. Our work and social lives were blurred completely. It made for great fun and a great environment. It was our own Melrose Place, but with C++ code instead of an advertising agency. It had COMDEX instead of Venice Beach.

The magic is not about joining the next big thing, but the magic is in being part of something big *and* doing that with a peer group that is just as motivated and just as smart you (think) you are. What I found out about Microsoft is that they had managed to hire a hundred college grads who were better programmers and knew more about software than me and were anxious to learn even more. And we were all working within the structure that allowed us to create the next big things. And we were all friends.

Microsoft is more about that today than we ever have been. Going through the “internet transition” that our company is famous for reinforced just how much the “under 30” crowd has to offer product development and at the same time just how far a little bit of “adult supervision” can go. To be clear that was about reinforcing that idea, not creating it. Steve Ballmer hired college graduates starting in 1980 and as late as 1990 I remember that he was copied on every interview schedule from college. Hiring from college is a core of Microsoft. Training people to be professionals and to focus their energy, creativity, and ideas on really delivering software to the world is also our core. Maybe in 1980 we were all trying to impress each other with software. Now we’re trying to impress the whole world!

One lesson I learned at Microsoft that I didn’t expect was how much of a meritocracy the company is. I mentioned previously that at a startup you are more likely to be the college “kid” doing grunt work than you might think, whereas at Microsoft the college kid is going to be the one presenting their work to Bill Gates (as we did a few weeks ago when we toured Bill around our hallways for an afternoon to show in Office “12”). We do not have a caste system based on seniority or on what type of or which degree you received. Once a company starts telling you about the degrees that people have or emphasizing specific schools you should know that such feelings run deep and don’t go away once you manage to get a job. In fact, companies that do that often look to folks outside those pedigrees to do the grunt work. When I was in college it was Bell Labs famous for hiring Cornell grads, and then you get there and find out that all the talk about PhDs was simply because it was the people with PhDs that ran the place. I think when you look at the leaders of the company you are likely to see a company created in their model—if the founders value a PhD then you can bet that they will value that in employees. Microsoft’s founders are probably most famous for the degrees they didn’t earn and therein rests the focus on the merits and the accomplishments over a career. I thought I was all fancy with my degrees, but really what mattered was can I get done what I committed to and how good was the work I did.

So there is a lot of talk about joining these “new” companies and the "new" way they hire people and let them work. It is one of those stories that repeats itself in journalism. What you experience at Microsoft is as much about what you bring to Microsoft—this is a business, not an amusement park. The great people that are drawn to Microsoft every summer create their own thrill rides while we together build software that changes the world. So grab your unicycle!

--Steven

College Hire and Intern Fair (Photos)

steven_sinofsky — Thu, 28 Jul 2005 04:24:00 GMT

Seattle, 7/27 6:30PM

Just got back from the annual College Hire and Intern Fair. Every year we hold a big bbq for all the interns and college hires who started this summer. Today was a beautiful day for the event (ok a bit hot). And also a bit of a celebration because Beta1 of Windows Vista was released to select partners.

Today we had about 60 booths set up for all the teams at Microsoft to show off their latest and greatest software. There were demos of all the new work going on in the company—we have a lot of new products spanning just about every type of software you can imagine. Of course we had a booth showing off Office “12”!

The highlight of the day is a speech and q&a session with Steve Ballmer. Steve is incredibly enthusiastic about hiring from college and told the story about starting Microsoft’s college hiring program back in 1980 or so. Ever since then the company has grown college hiring every year.

The q&a was really good. There were a bunch of good questions. One super interesting question was about what Microsoft can do to encourage women (in particular) to join the ranks of technology/computer scientists. I know from working with Steve that he is incredibly passionate about diversity and he also referenced the work that BillG is doing with his wife Melinda through the Gates Foundation. Steve also talked about the programs we have for high schools both for internships and also to help educators with their technology needs. An interesting part of his answer though was how much more the technology industry can do around diversity in general. He spoke about how we need, as an industry, to do much more to bring in additional points of views and additional ways of working—going beyond the culture that dominates now.

Microsoft is an incredibly diverse company. We recruit college students from all over the world. Just in my hallway at Microsoft there are men and women from every continent (well no Antarctica) representing probably a dozen native languages and cultures. The diversity is all around us – but all of us in the technology industry need to keep doing more to respect and encourage diversity so our work products continue to be products for the world and products of the world.

Out on my MSN Space I put a few pictures from today’s event.

--Steven Sinofsky

Thoughts on the first few years of a new hire at Microsoft

steven_sinofsky — Wed, 27 Jul 2005 01:10:00 GMT

I wanted to write some thoughts on career progression for new hires at Microsoft. Up front I should probably say that I am not trying to sell folks on Microsoft, but trying to tell it like it is. Folks who know me often accuse me of being too honest. What I would say to people looking to enter the job market for the first time is that you are being marketed to—that means that you have to learn to separate the claims from the realities. I think that is something I hope to do over the coming months.

It is performance review season at Microsoft so everyone is busy with that process. It is also a time of year when people take a step back and think about where they are heading in their careers and what they should think about in terms of career goals over the next year or three. A member of our team that is going through her first review stopped me in the hallway today and wanted to chat for a minute. A question on her mind is “what should I expect out of my career in the next five years”. In other words, what is the typical first 5 years like at Microsoft.

Of course my first response as a manager is to say “no career is typical”. I think that is a normal manager reaction to trying to avoid making specific commitments in the hallway :-) It is also a truism at Microsoft--no career path is typical and certainly nothing comes without hard work and solid execution.

We hire a lot of folks straight from college in the Office team. The first 5 or 6 years can be exciting, but is also challenging, so a new hire needs to be committed to learning and growing with the organization. So the first rule is “be prepared to learn”. As someone wrote me last week, “what if you’re not happy with your first assignment, then what?” This is a common concern since sometimes your first assignment doesn’t sound quite what you thought it would be. This is especially true if you are unfamiliar with the whole area and it doesn’t sound like a familiar college course (databases, languages, etc.) In most software development, when it comes right down to doing the work there are a lot of details that are a lot deeper and perhaps less “science” than college courses.

Once you have that first round product cycle experience (generally in the first couple of years in Office where our full product cycles are 20-30 months—it might sound long but that is a topic for another missive I’d love to fire off, “the myths and realities of internet time”) people tend to follow one of two paths. First you can choose to stick with the same group working on a different area perhaps. This is probably the most common as people develop expertise and interests. Surprisingly, most members of our team self-select to stay working on the same product area the second time around.

The second path is one where you choose to work on another technology, either in Office or somewhere else at Microsoft. Of course at Microsoft you have the opportunities to work on an amazing breadth of software from the living room to the board room. Most people who want something different also look at other parts of Office. At each product cycle we have an open and systematic opportunity for people to move across the team. This process is one where people are encouraged to move and to talk freely about the opportunities. In fact, at the start of a release it is not uncommon for 25-30% of the team to seek out new technologies to work on (and new managers to work for).

During the course of these first two product cycles I believe the most significant core learning takes place in terms of being a contributing engineer to end-user software development. Whether you are program management, software design engineer in testing, or development every day is a learning experience. You learn all the core skills with close mentoring—your manager will work with you on a daily basis on your specs, your code, your test plans. You will have peer review of your work. And at Microsoft you have the opportunity through our open mentoring program to receive a mentor from any part of the company. It is during this time that if you are performing exceptional work you will receive promotions through the career ladder system. This system is described in our intranet with detailed examples of the skills required and the inputs your manager (and his/her manager) have in terms of evaluating your accomplishments. You are eligible for promotion throughout the year (unlike some companies that only allow one time per year). While nothing is typical, as an example, a strongly performing developer hired from college might expect to be promoted in 12-24 months, and then again in about the same time period. A lot of this of course depends on the team and how your performance stands out relative to them—performance is not measured in isolation.

A key thing is about how your own work changes during this time. The first thing that changes is your scope. When you first start you will have something to do that is narrow and you will have your manager helping you every day. Believe me the first time you do a checkin it a super stressful time—after all your work is on the way to being used by 400 million people. Whether it is code or a web service, the thought of a ton of folks using your code can really keep you up at night. Over time as you master the overall system you will learn about how the components interact—how does your work impact macros and solutions, localization, corporate desktop management, and of course there is a ton to learn about security, quality, performance. So your first checkin will be probably localized to one file, but over time you will find yourself checking in code in many places (or writing specs, testing areas, etc.) In fact, if you work on shared code in Office you will own features/code/tests that cover all of the “Office System”.

After you have gained the experience at contributing at the right level you will start to be asked to take on broader responsibilities. One example might be mentoring interns for the summer where you would have an intern that you are required to “manage”. Perhaps one of the most exciting things for me is to see someone I remember as an intern transitioning to the role of an intern mentor for the summer. We had quite a few folks this summer who were interns 2 or 3 summers ago. It is great to see people moving along through their own careers. It also makes me feel old!!

At this point people do start to decide “is management for me or not”? This is a natural question and why our career progression recognizes that not everyone wants to be a manager. In fact, even our managers must contribute to the code/specs/tests of shipping products, so being a manager does not let you off the hook. But should you want to be in management, it will actually become pretty natural and you will see that the opportunities will arise and at the start of a cycle you will soon enough find yourself what we call a “lead” or first line manager. I started managing folks about 4 years into Microsoft. In hindsight I probably wasn’t quite ready and I was definitely shaky. Fortunately my first reports were forgiving. Whether you are a manager or not the progression through the career ladder is possible (in other words promotion is not tied to management, but related to your technical aptitude, ability to work independently, and as always the business need). The key thing of course is that Microsoft is hiring people all the time so the need continues to grow for senior people, whether managers or not, who understand how to build real-world software.

Once you reach this part of your career, perhaps that magic first 5-6 years of experience, you become much more “in charge” of your own career as you have the experience and understanding of what you are looking for. You probably established a network or at least some contacts in other parts of the company and so exploring also begins. It is also the case that for the folks that came up with the best designs or wrote the best code, it is amazing how quickly word spreads and you will definitely be sought out by others.

The short answer to the question this note posed is that the first 5 or so years of a career at Microsoft are a huge learning experience. But not a trial by fire, but a way of “drinking from a fire hose, but with supervision” You’re surrounded by people who have experience and more importantly empathy for you and are super motivated to help you to learn how to contribute to our products. And even more importantly we are super interested in tapping your creativity and energy at solving the challenges our customers face by building great software.

--Steven

Changing career paths at Microsoft -- short answer

steven_sinofsky — Fri, 22 Jul 2005 08:19:00 GMT

Today I was talking with an intern who was having a good, but not great, summer working on one of our teams. He felt that perhaps he would be more successful if he was involved with testing more than development. His question was "is this really possible"?

It is good question. Since Microsoft is growing and big, there are always going to be new opportunities than we have people for. The question is really whether Microsoft and any one person makes a good match. In talking with this one person and the kinds of experiences he was looking for, it seems like testing might be a better match so I definitely encouraged him to apply for a second summer with us but in testing. We'll see what his hiring manager and mentor working with recruiting all feel. In the end, we always have the bests interests of the candidate and Microsoft when we make these decisions--it only makes sense if there is a good match. As Mike Maples (a retired VP at Microsoft who is really responsible for so many great things in Office/applications and who had a huge impact on me) once said, "things always work out in the long run" and that has always meant a lot to me in my career.

I started at Microsoft in development as a software design engineer. I worked for several releases on our C++ products helping to create the Microsoft Foundation Classes. In hindsight, I should have seen that I probably was a better fit for program management (Chris Pratley's summary of program management is a good one for sure). I always seemed more adept at working on the customer, design and project issues than on writing the code--my code was always nice and orderly, but I probably couldn't write enough code fast enough to really be the very best at programming. Hmmm...I'm not sure I should be sharing that. Sigh.

So I moved to program management when I switched to the Office group. One thing that is great about Microsoft is that because we have such a broad "interface" with customers you can have opportunities to work on just about any aspects of the software world. If you look at the courses you can talk in comp sci in college (compilers, databases, AI, human factors, databases, operating systems, graphics, etc.), Microsoft has products used by tons of folks in all those areas--market leading products dedicated to leading edge technology. So making a switch is not only easy, but also something that you might expect to do after a few years in one area if you want.

Program management seemed like a more natural fit for me--working on designs, ironing out the details of features, considering alternatives, and also the externally facing aspects were great fun for me and really helped to contribute to Office as we grew the shared architecture of the product. For example, one of the early things I got to work on was creating a "high touch" advisory council of customers we could work with in an ongoing way while we made Office 2000. This was a unique creation at Microsoft and the first time we engaged customers in actually helping us to design features of the product through iterative and interactive design. If you're interested in stuff like this you might check out a research area from a professor at MIT named Eric von Hippel, who pioneered a field called "lead user research". There is a lot of similarity to what we developed in program management around the Office Advisory Council (which is something we continue to do, even with Office12).

That's a long way of saying that what I told this one intern--moving around is a normal part of developing your career at Microsoft. You have all the opportunties to "dive deep" and excel at one area (for example, folks who have worked on databases in Office have done so for many years because it is technically deep, always evolving, and super important for customers) or you can learn the ropes in one area/discipline and move to another.

Well so far so good--I seem to be writing a lot. If I'm off the mark or folks have other topics of interest, by all means let me know. thx. --steven

Q&A Session today -- "Fascinating technology"

steven_sinofsky — Fri, 22 Jul 2005 01:58:00 GMT

Today the interns got together and I got to host a q&a session, which is always a highlight of the summer for me. Beforehand I get emailed tons of questions from our 100+ interns working on Office and Information Worker software. There are many cool themes to the questions.

One question I loved was "What do you think is the most fascinating area of technology under development today and what is Microsoft doing in this area?"

Of course I could go on about the amazing new releases of many products - all of them significant in their innovation they will bring to the market and for customers, but I’m probably biased :-)

One product that came to mind is the new Microsoft Communicator product. There was another question about how to handle "information overload" which is related. I think of my day and I see incoming email, incoming instant messenger sessions, phone calls (mobile and work land line), and all the RSS feeds I get (just to name a few). The PC provides a great tool to help to manage these and Microsoft Office Communicator is a new product that helps to manage this (you can see more info on Office Communicator).

We just got Communicator hooked up for Microsoft and it has some cool features for managing all the inbound stuff, especially when used in combination with Outlook. There are some neat features which really save me a ton of time:

Whenever I’m using my office phone, the IM status indicator changes to "on phone" because Communicator is connected to Microsoft’s PBX. It is a small thing, but it really makes a big difference.

In addition, when I get an inbound call, because of the integration we’ve done I see the caller-ID pop up from the Communicator UI which is also pretty cool. A weird side effect is that even when I’m using my laptop and wireless I see the caller ID on phone calls I get in my office – that’s sort of not useful, but also a neat computer trick.
The biggest time save is that the combination of Communicator and Microsoft’s Live Communications server allows me to integrate with AOL and Yahoo messenger. My mother uses Yahoo and my family uses AOL (oops!) so this is super helpful to me during work when I need to get in touch with people during the day or vice versa.
There is of course integration with Outlook so when I get mail from someone I see their current presence information in the message header and can start an IM right away.

The technology is still new for sure and definitely has some work to do on the user experience (IMHO). I really look forward to the even deeper integration with new technologies like voip providers and the like (I am a VOIP user for our primary land line at home).

That was just one of the many questions I got. I’ve answered a bunch in email as well. I will keep the discussion going on this blog as well.

Have a good day,

Steven