Out with the Old, In with the New – Part II

As alluded to in a previous post, I had been considering my future here at MSN Messenger Server and Microsoft for a while. Starting in 2002, through two internships, I have now been working on Messenger Server for a cumulative total of over 24 months–2 years! Two years is half the time I spent in college. People say that when you get comfortable, it’s time to move on. And so, the first week of April will be my last on Messenger.  I’ll be starting on a new team in the building next door–but more on this in a future post. I thought I would devote this post to my thoughts on the whole Internal Transfer Process.

(To be absolutely clear, I think there’s still a lot of cool stuff to be done in Messenger Server. Just look at some of the job openings Messenger has open. Personally, I just needed a change.)

 

The Internal Transfer Process

[ Prior to writing this entry, I did do my due diligence to see if there’s other stuff out there on the web, to make sure I wasn’t revealing anything I could get fired for. So for additional information, see Career Development at Microsoft: The internal interview process and How did I get here – changing jobs at Microsoft. ]

Microsoft is a large software company. In fact, Microsoft is the largest software company in the world. If there’s any niche of software anywhere in this world, chances are that there is someone, somewhere within the company that’s working on some product that’s related to that niche. Hence the whole evil empire/monopoly accusations. But this makes it great for employees as they can move around within the company (keeping benefits, etc.) to continually work on products that challenge them and are new and interesting and exciting.

At least, that’s the idea. I have heard this spiel time and time again and am personally guilty of using it as a recruiting pitch for external candidates. But having never been through the process until now, I couldn’t really say if it was as easy as people say it is. I guess I half expected it to be as easy as, "oh you’re interested? You’re hired!" But then again, I am (at least) a little deluded. So my own personal story went something like this:

1. Talk to people (within Messenger, outside of Messenger within Microsoft, ex-Messenger folk who left Microsoft, etc.) It was here that I (by some really random chance) heard of a new startup group that was being started by a friend’s wife’s ex-teammate’s boss. You can also surf the internal version of Microsoft Careers for interesting openings.
2. Decide to look around by doing "informational interviews". These are completely informal 1:1 meetings where you get to know about the opportunities in a particular group and the hiring manager roughly gauges if you would be a good fit for the group.  If you’re interested in the group and they reciprocate that interest, it’s time to move forward.
3. Request permission to interview. More on this below.
4. Set up an interview loop (for each team you’re interested in) via HR. In my case, I only set up a single loop (I put all my eggs in one basket–which is really not advisable).
5. Interview day. Fairly grueling–especially if you haven’t gone through this in a while (as I hadn’t). This shocks you into how rusty you are (especially as I didn’t prepare).  See Guy Kawasaki’s The Art of Recruiting for an almost identical play-by-play commentary of my day.
6. Hear back from hiring manager. Yes/No/Maybe-so. I hear that if you don’t hear back in five business days, you can assume acknowledge the worst. In my case the hiring manager was OOF the entire week, so needless to say, it was a traumatic week.
7. Get an offer from the group(s); accept the offer.
8. Prospective group’s management and current group’s management work out a start date.

Seems fairly straightforward, no? The entire process for me took (will take) exactly 8 weeks, from doing the informational to starting on the team.

 

On Getting Permission

I found this a rather strange requirement, but I completely understand why HR would require this. If employees could interview without telling their management, you’d have a situation not much different from someone who leaves the company for another. You’d be caught completely unexpected not only with a vacant position to fill, but also with a gap in the knowledge that employee carried in his head. In this case, it’d be slightly better being that they’re still in the company with the same e-mail address, but who wants to be tech support for X weeks after leaving? Requiring permission to interview also offers management the opportunity to address whatever is making the employee leave (depending if he’s running away from something, or running to something).

But on the other hand, asking for permission to interview is like a death wish. What you’re proclaiming is essentially, "I think this other group(s) is (are) better than this (current) one." An ex-manager of our team said to me not long ago, "Asking for permission to interview without an out is like running around with your pants off." In other words, you better get hired. Otherwise you’ll be "stuck" in your current group with your managers knowing that you had thought about leaving–you had thought about betraying your group. And obviously that won’t do come compensation and stack rank time. Why promote someone that might consider leaving again when you can promote some other person of similar skill who’s completely loyal to the team? In other words, you better be dead-set on leaving, or be prepared to face the consequences. And even if you’re dead-set on leaving, you better make sure you get a "Hire" elsewhere. I suppose this is why they limit the time you get to interview to two months. People that were set on this single "dream job" but don’t get hired for the position are screwed.

I’ve heard of horror stories of people asking for permission to interview and having to wait six months for permission (until they complete certain deliverables). Ouch. Mine took two weeks and I was constantly second guessing myself during that time: What are they [management] thinking? What was I thinking? Why would you "throw away" a secure job for some half-ass chance at another one? It definitely plays with your head.

 

Lateral Transfers

HR frowns on anything but lateral transfers–big time. Again, it makes sense. If a team offered someone a higher salary/promotion, then you’d get people changing teams often as it would become a free market of sorts (people going to the highest bidder). Enforcing lateral transfers means that the only incentive for switching groups is the actual work that they do, and not the compensation they offer. On the other hand, this sucks. When people switch companies, compensation is more often than not a large factor. You want to get brought in at a higher level. Who wants to stay at the same level and have to rebuild on your new team that reputation that you’ve painstakingly built on your old team? There’s going to be some setback whether you like it or not, and it’d be nice to be compensated for that. Alas, that’s not how it works.

 

Thoughts on the Process

I’ve found that the process as a whole is much less structured that I had thought. The hiring team’s managers don’t talk to your current managers until you’ve accepted an offer and it’s time to discuss your start date. In fact, the "official permission" only comes in the form of a dinky e-mail template.

So having gone through it all, what do I think? It’s definitely a harrowing experience I don’t care to go through again anytime soon. I haven’t sat on the opposite side of the table answering interview questions in a very long time. I was quite rusty. Throwing unknowns into a stable, secure job is a very risky thing to do. On the one hand it’d be great to be able to mutually agree that you got the job from something as simple as an informational; but there really is a need for checks and balances to make sure people don’t move around too often. The process works fairly well, even though it’s a rough ride for the candidate. I guess if you can’t handle it, then, well.. too bad.

Live on a Roll

Good summary article from C|Net:

Windows Live offers Microsoft a quicker turnaround

Although it has taken Microsoft five years to develop the next version of Windows, the software maker seems to crank out a new Windows Live service every five minutes.

This is the first real positive article I’ve seen on the Windows Live stuff since we’ve rolled out all these new services; and if you actually look at the Windows Live chart that C|Net has compiled, it actually looks quite impressive.  Now let’s see how long before these services get adopted by mainstream users.

Tech Forrest

Not too long ago, we had an analyst from Forrester, Charlene Li, come to campus and brief us on one of our major competitors. I’d never seen an analyst briefing before so it was quite interesting, to say the least. There were a couple insights in her talk too that I found gave me a fresh perspective on the competition. Here was a person whose sole purpose was to research tech companies and to try to figure out what they were doing and where they were heading, not to mention where the industry is heading as a whole. How cool is that?

Anyhow, there was one thing in particular she mentioned that got to me. She said that (and I am completely paraphrasing here–the usual disclaimer applies) she is always surprised how MS employees are to some extent clueless with what happens outside of the company, considering that we are at the forefront of the industry as a whole, being a major player and all. She asked how many people read Techcrunch (there weren’t many), and if we didn’t, well.. we should.

So I’ve been reading Techcrunch for three or four weeks now, and I am amazed by it (amazed may be too strong a word). Working for MS as an intern, and then coming straight here after college, you tend to think that MS is the be-all and end-all. You know of the existence of start-ups, but it’s just this vague notion of filthy developers coding into the night, high on caffeine and sugar–with no real impact. Techcrunch is constantly profiling these start-ups with cool new ideas. These companies either fade away from lack of funding, or get acquired by MS/Y!/G/eBay. I had no idea these companies really existed. I definitely recommend it if you’re in the tech industry.  Very cool.

Live.com Refresh

Playing with the Live.com Refresh this morning (which is pretty cool, by the way–I love how it refreshes automatically and I love the pop-ups, now only if I could resize them), I thought of something: Refresh? Whatever happened to the days of making a fix and immediately propping bits? Yesterday one of our test leads had his five year anniversary. He told a story of remembering when he first started on the team, and they were in some release or other and some guy woke up at 3AM for a hotfix, built a private on his machine, and propped it out to Production. "What build are we running in Live Site?" "Oh, private build off of my machine on Sat.. :)" Imagine that!

So at what point does a service go from free-form to having processes in place. Most processes are in place for a reason, so that, for instance, some dev doesn’t go and take down the entire service, taking millions of users offline (there goes the four nines in availability). But the danger is in instituting processes for the sake of more processes.

I don’t know much about Live.com, and I don’t think that they’re anywhere near that stage, but I came across Sanaz‘s Getting Real entry:

… and just reflect on:
– am i staying true to my principles that i was so hardcore about during start.com days
– more importantly which ones are impossible in the live.com world and why

one thing i would say is:
during start.com it was all about: experiment, iterate and improve a concept and make customers happy by listening to them. and who did everything: a few ppl, end-to-end for design, pm, dev, test, planning, marketing – everyone basically wore all the hats.

live.com: it’s different. there are many more stakeholders, some justifiably so and some maybe not. so many stakeholders that it’s hard to keep track. some are stakeholders and some think they are. the biggest challenge is making sure the right ppl are involved – the more ppl the longer it takes to just get shit done. and that is hard – very hard, but absolutely crucial. it’s the balance of how do i keep the project going, while keeping everyone happy. and keeping everyone, or at least most folks 🙂 , happy is crucial if you actually want to succeed in the corporate world… it’s almost like start.com had one set of customers: our users, live.com has two, the internal teams/stakeholders and our users 🙂 so my rule of thumb is, if the teams/stakeholders can help us build a better product for our customers then that’s great! if not, let’s not waste eachother’s time.

If there’s some bug fix or feature that we know is going to make customers (be it users or Ops), why can’t we roll it out asap? Why can’t we prioritize on what customers want? And what happened to Start.com’s "cool feature? let’s push it out!" mentality?

RSS Hoopla

So about a year ago Start.com launched (v2). I loved the customization concept–in a web browser of all things! It was only then did I start playing with the whole RSS stuff. I had heard of RSS (and Atom feeds via Google/Blogger) but had only a vague notion of what they were. Indeed, it turned out that I wasn’t the only one.

Anyhow, in the past year, my list of RSS feeds that I read has (slowly) grown, encompassing friends’ Spaces, Xanga, Blogger feeds, news feeds, etc etc. And even with the launch of Live.com, I’ve stuck with Start.com (for some reason I just like it better). I loved how my Start.com page could roam.

Earlier this year, I realized that using Start.com just wasn’t going to scale for me. After adding 20-30 feeds, my Start.com page was beginning to look like a haphazard kludge of links. It was nice to be able to glance at the page to see if there was anything new I hadn’t read, but now I had to scroll through the entire page.. up/down/up/down. So I decided to give a client-side RSS reader a try. And what better client to try than Dare‘s baby RSS Bandit?

And it’s not half bad. It’s not too slow (even on my seven year old laptop) and accomplishes its job. (Feeds that include comments–very cool.) Things I don’t like include:

• The web browser in the app doesn’t understand the ‘back’ button on my mouse.
• The web browser in the app doesn’t understand javascript.
• I can’t turn off the dang pop-up bubble that says "6 feed(s) with 549 new message(s)".
• It’d be great to have a little X on the top right of each new feed so I can ‘clear’ them as I read them.
• The whole notion of only showing ‘unread’ feeds when clicking the feed name is a little strange. It took me a while to realize that I had read all the entries in a feed (which is why it was completely blank).
• I don’t like how it collapses all my folders when I restart it.
• I’d like to be able to reorder feed categories and folders (and creating a new one seems to put it on the top of the list.
• It took me forever to find the "Import" button, and by then I had already added each of my feeds by hand (but that’s probably just me). :S
• What’s up with the goofy little icon?  And I don’t get that bag jumping up and down when new feeds arrive at all.  (I guess it’s a bag of cash or something.)

But overall, I’m quite satisfied. I get my influx of things to read (although I can’t stand those sites that only publish a couple sentences so that you have to click through for the entire article). Even then, I’m convinced that there’s got to be a better way to organize all these feeds. I still find it very busy. I’m not sure how to describe what I want–but I’m quite sure this isn’t it.  How are my parents ever going to figure out RSS?  It’s still not usable for the common person.  (Then again, my parents figured out PSMs and winks and nudges and custom emoticons in Messenger, so you never know…)

In a semi-related note, Ray Ozzie (CTO of MS), announced at ETech today the concept of the Live Clipboard. It’s pretty cool. Should be interesting to see how quickly this is picked up.

TechFest 2006

Connecting the Dots: Microsoft Researchers, Other Employees Share Ideas, Build Relationships at Sixth Annual TechFest
Microsoft stimulates technology transfer between its global research labs and product teams with a two-day gathering at the company’s Redmond, Wash. campus.

 

Managed to steal away from work today to go to the TechFest. Besides finding the time, one of the things that makes it hard to attend events in the Microsoft Conference Center is that it’s on an entirely different campus from where MSN lives (5 minutes away). The hassle of finding parking when you’re there (and coming back); as well as the fact that you have the leave the building (I’m a dev, remember?) … So the shuttles help (although they take forever).

Anyhow, TechFest provides a very interesting glimpse into what the famed MSR folks are working on. There are plenty of, "oh that’s cool", and ".. and why are we paying you to do this?!" moments. From a cursory glance of many of the exhibits, I’d say the following areas are "hot":

(1) Search, search, search. The (obvious) ability to find something on the world wide web; the ability to search for things amongst your friends and family; the ability to find this, that, and everything and anything you ever wanted.

(2) Maps, maps, maps. Tons and tons of Virtual Earth demos. Integrating where you are with: your family, your friends, your dog (ok I’m making this up now). (By the way, have you seen http://preview.local.live.com?)

(3) Speech Recognition. Use your voice to do this, use your voice to do that. I talked with one guy who was using (Chinese Mandarin) speech recognition and combining it with handwriting/character recognition to get more accurate results. Having delved a bit with using Markov Models for speechrecognitionn and machine learning, I asked him about the accents/dialect issues users would have, as well as the corpus of data he was using. Long story short, the idea wasn’t particularly genius, and the tool was nowhere near ready for prime time.

(4) And as with any event like this one, there’s the usual displays for graphics, theory, hardware, etc. etc. It’s funny how herds of people will gravitate towards booths with large HDTVs or projectors showing hi-end graphics and movies. Some really cool demos here.

Oh, and I also passed by Bill Gates. I was walking in the hall from one display room to another and he was walking in the opposite direction (10 ft away?) There was an entourage of people with him. I resisted the temptation to ask for his autograph (and getting tackled by his bodyguards).

Anyhow, so what do I think of TechFest? I think it’s a great forum for ‘regular’ employees to see what those MSR folks are dreaming of. It’s a fun fair of sorts that gets employees out of the offices thinking about things they would never think of. But whereas I thought previously that it would be a dream job (getting paid to do essentially whatever you wanted in the famed MSR), now I’m not so sure. Working on some ill-defined concept that never sees the light of day isn’t particularly appealing. I overheard some researcher say today, "oh yeah this is a really new project. We still need to work on it, and we’re looking to see what product teams could adopt it." I’ve heard getting ideas and concepts shipped is a road less traveled in MSR.

Oh, and you thought Microsoft is full of the geeks and nerds with pocket protectors? You should meet some of these MSR folks.

---

Addendum:

 Microsofties love freebies, a lot

Now I love free stuff as much as anyone else (ok, maybe a little more than the "normal" person–not sure if that’s the product of college; but I think I could devote an entire post to free stuff), but this was just plain ridiculous.  On signing in to the TechFest (by swiping your badge), you were given a "gift"–a light-up key fob.  Only one "gift" per person–and you had your choice of blue, yellow, green, and red.  Wow.  You can get these for free in building 8.  Oh but wait, these light up!  Personally I expected them to play a song when you pulled the cord, but that’s just me.  That was disappointing.  I don’t use fobs; I gave mine to Steve.  "To further discourage repeats, the badge scanner buzzed whenever someone tried to get a second handout. "  (To think that someone spent the time to code that up..)  C’mon people.  I bet people resorted to this foolishness because there wasn’t any food at TechFest.  That too was disappointing.  🙂