Thursday, May 04, 2006 10:48 PM
by
YAG
Group Manager to Architect? What's that about?
A few people have asked me why I opted to move from a Group Manager role to an architect role. Well, there are a few reasons:
- One of the awesome things about Microsoft is that there’s a clear career path whether you manage people or don’t. So I didn’t have to go to a job where I managed more people – it’s something I love to do, don’t get me wrong – but it was nice having the option of doing something like this when the opportunity arose.
- Community is something that always gets me excited. I “grew up” on Compuserve, user groups, conferences and the internet. Being a part of various communities is a big part of who I am. Being able to continue extending that was an amazing opportunity.
- I missed “getting my hands dirty” with coding and architecture. It’s been a while since my Codebook days. <g> I’m really looking forward to using the things we built in Visual Studio on a day-to-day basis.
- The architect position at Microsoft is one that involves a lot of cross-team, and cross-division influencing – and that’s another aspect that I love.
- Finally (and this was a big one) – it’s a great team of people I’ll be working with. More about that in my next blog entry.
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About YAG
Yair Alan Griver is the architect for the Microsoft.com community properties. As architect, he is responsible for creating a coherent underlying platform for properties that include blogs.msdn.com, forums.msdn.com, GotDotNet, chats and CodePlex. In addition to MSCOM architect, Alan is also responsible for the continued development of Visual FoxPro. Prior to the architect role, Alan was Group Manager for the Visual Studio Data group. As Group Manager, Alan’s teams produced the tools used inside of Visual Studio .NET, Office and SQL Server that surface data capabilities, as well as Visual FoxPro. Prior to this position, Alan was a Lead Program Manager and Community Evangelist for Visual Basic .NET, driving community interests into Visual Basic .NET. Before joining Microsoft, Alan was Chief Information Officer at GoAmerica, a publicly traded telecommunications (wireless internet) company, and co-founder and CIO of Flash Creative Management a business strategy and technology consulting company.
Alan is the author of five books on Visual FoxPro and Visual Basic, the creator of various development frameworks, and has developed database systems ranging into the thousands of users. He has spoken around the world on databases, object orientation and development team management issues, as well as XML and messaging-based applications.
