Referrals

My team is getting re-org’ed.  You can’t go six months in Microsoft without getting re-org’ed.  It shouldn’t affect us much though.  We’ll see..

Even though our team is about to swallow another team, we’re still actively hiring.  So I’ll pose a hypothetical question (which I don’t necessarily face at the moment, but I’ve always wondered how to act faced with this scenario).

Let’s say someone you know (ie. from some established relationship–be it a friendship, prior working relationship, or even a familial relationship) asks you if there are any openings in your company and/or team.  If you respect that person and/or believe that that person has qualities that would be beneficial to your organization, then it is a non-issue.  But if you personally don’t believe that person has got what it takes, then what do you do?  You can:

1. Pass it on to the people in charge (HR/hiring manager); They can deal with the person.
2. Tell the person to look elsewhere: "There aren’t any [good] openings here right now."
3. Do nothing, but tell the person you contacted the right people.
4. Tell the person they aren’t good enough.

The problem with (1) is that not only do they place strain on HR or hiring manager, if your friend does get hired, you might have to work with him/her.  Plus side here is that you might get a referral bonus.. haha.

The problem with (3) is that it is inherently dishonest.  I know at least one person that went down this route and didn’t find issue with it though.  Not to mention that it is fairly egotistical to judge others and personally bar entry.

And (2) is similar to (3).  Who are you to judge?  You essentially brush them off without being dishonest.

And with (4)?  Say goodbye to your friendship.

The farther you go down this list, the bigger your ego is.  At issue is the distinction between a working relationship from all other relationships.  Just because you consider a person a friend doesn’t necessarily mean that they would be a good person to work with.  So how do you keep these separate?

It’s an interesting little dilemma.  Personally I choose the lesser of four evils: #(2).

There’s also the flip side of the coin to consider.  What happens when I am out there in the market and I call on my friends?

Company Meeting 2006: “People__Ready”

Once a year, Microsoft employees gather at Safeco Field to cheer on (and/or laugh hysterically at) our CEO while he:

• prances around a stage and the audience shouting and moving like a monkey
• yells, "I. Love. This. Company!"
• "and blah blah blah …"
• with his big underarm sweat stains
• trademark fist pumping/punching action

Miscellaneous thoughts:

The first half (ie. all the product demos) wasn’t particularly interesting (although I can definitely say they beat last year’s Dynamics demo hands down–ooo Excel can do inline bar charts!!..).

LisaB was the first of a series of interesting exec speeches.  She came *this* close to mentioning Mini by name (or was it more of a threat?).  It was quite funny.

BillG received a standing ovation, as usual.  Something about him being the richest person in the world that gets people all riled up.

MSR demo was cool.  The only problem is that it needs to be dark…

ROzzie delivered his typical internet services disruption spiel.  If you read very carefully in that speech there are some interesting points.

I enjoyed the Apple rip-off ads.  It was about time.  And the brief video of The Office‘s Dwight Schrute was surprising, but anti-climactic. (Yeah that’s right–Dwight has a blog.. it’s quite funny; no feed though.)

The tone of this year’s meeting was decidedly different from the last.  There wasn’t nearly as much kool-aid flowing–I don’t think there needed to be as much as last year.  That Mini has had an impact (albeit smaller, I think, than people realize), but an impact nonetheless.

Windows Live Writer, Take II

So I’m sitting here in my office with two folks from the Windows Live Writer team.  And they’re asking me to blog on demand.. it’s kinda weird (like peeing into a cup).  It sounds like how Scoble blogs (I’ve never understood how someone could blog and seemingly interact with people at the same time; I always blog after the fact once I collect my thoughts).

I’ve been using Writer pretty exclusively since it came out a month or so ago–it’s been pretty good to me–and they were looking for lab rats (ahem, volunteers) to be observed to see how they could improve the product.

* * *

Whew.. ok so they’re gone.  Proves that I can’t write under pressure.  But wow, I learnt so many things about Writer that I didn’t know:

• inserting/tweaking images from disk;
• inserting maps (yeah I can’t say that I really explore the "Insert" menu);
• why publishing to my FTP didn’t work;
• why it doesn’t prompt for my Blogger password (but it does for Passport);
• how it does the "Update Weblog Style" (they even had me run through a trial run).

It turns out a lot of features just weren’t really discoverable for me.  I also learnt I’m a pretty atypical, "minimalist" blogger.  And most of the other nits were fairly common:

• sloooooow startup time
• using way too much memory
• spell check on-the-fly
• no "Ignore All" button in spell check
• blue is nasty
• pretty-printing HTML
• [And, as I just discovered (comments aren’t very discoverable in Spaces), and as LV pointed out, if only it did grammar checking!]
• And, I had noticed that sometimes it leaves an instance of Writer around, after exiting… ^o)

I realized while thinking about this last night, that one of the reasons I like Writer is that it accomplishes exactly what I had wanted to do myself ever since I started blogging.  I’ve always wanted to write my own light-weight client-side app that owns the whole editing-publishing workflow of blogging–I just never found the time (read: lazy) to do it.  But as an engineer, learning how this stuff works (especially that "Update Weblog Style" thing) is just so dang cool!!

It was a great way to spend an hour on a Thursday afternoon.  I love talking to people that "get it."  I’m ready to evangelize this product!.. (Download!)  Good job Live Writer team.. I can’t wait to see what they come out with next!

The 5th Floor of Building 34

Wow that rhymes..  (sorry, I am easily amused).

For any that don’t know, the 5th floor of building 34 on Main Campus is where all the execs work.  It’s supposed to be posh, with massive offices and private bathrooms (rumours abound).  I had never been to this mythical place myself (in fact, the floor plan isn’t even available on the intranet–all the other floors are), but, during my first internship, I had the pleasure of knowing one of several interns that decided to make a visit to that floor after hours (since they worked in that building anyway).  From what I heard, they were "caught" by a security guard, who promptly took down their names and ids and notified their managers.  Nothing much came of that.

.. Except they didn’t get hired … 😐

Anyway, back in May this year, Joel Spolsky wrote an interesting piece on his first BillG review (that seemed to get endlessly linked).  I don’t suppose I’ll ever have the "luxury" of sitting in on a BillG review, although it sounds very stimulating.  (Yet another item to add to the must-do list when working at Microsoft: must attend a meeting in building 7, must pull an all-nighter coding, must play 8-way multi-player Halo on networked XBoxes in conference rooms with big-screen projectors late at night, must skinny-dip in Lake Bill at midnight [oops, too much info..], etc etc.)

We had my first "Ray review" early this morning on the 5th floor of 34.  (Ray’s been in meetings here in North Campus before, but this was a review akin to a BillG one.)  Unfortunately, our conference room was right off the elevator, so I only got to see that, and the kitchen, which were both quite typical.  My tea tasted the same, and I didn’t notice any more drink selections than usual.  I didn’t even go to the washroom.  So I’ll have to leave dispelling 5th floor myths to another day…

[ Oh yeah.  The review went quite well.  And I can definitely attest to the stimulating nature of these discussions–you never know what’s going to happen.  Now I need to do some actual work, instead of just designing (aka "waving my hands around"). ]

Thanks for All the Fish

This post is a little cryptic, but I need to inconspicuously vent.

Thanks for kicking me on the way out.

I have no regrets.

News Feed + Mini Feed

From TechCrunch:
– New Facebook Redesign More Than Aesthetic
– Facebook Users Revolt, Facebook Replies

Right.  So Facebook introduced the concept of the "News Feed" and "Mini-Feed" yesterday.  And even though Facebook users don’t like it (I notice via my News Feed that one of my friends joined the group "facebook just became a little TOO creepy"), I have to agree with the Facebook blog:

These features are not only different from anything we’ve had on Facebook before, but they’re quite unlike anything you can find on the web.

I get it.  Feeds are the new hotness.  A year ago, I would go through the daily ritual of going to each one of my friend’s blogs in IE; but now I can just subscribe to them in an RSS aggregator and have all updates come to me.  And why shouldn’t that be applied to social networks??  Of course it can!  (Now Facebook just needs to expose RSS feeds for the News Feed + Mini-Feed.)  It totally makes sense.

So I get it.  But why the backlash?  Every single item in the News Feed was available for viewing before these two features.  The problem is that now it’s so easy.  In fact, it’s so easy that you don’t even need to do anything to get these updates.  Sure, as a stalker I could go to someone’s profile and refresh the page 20 times a day.  But now, all I have to do is sit back and wait for things to show up in my Mini-Feed.  How convenient.

The group "facebook just became a little TOO creepy" is a group at Berkeley that has its icon as: .  People are concerned about it being too "Big Brother"-ish.

Facebook demographics consists mostly of college students (and those that have graduated).  And unlike many of the other techie sites out there, it was adopted by arts-y people before the tech early adopters (similar to MySpace).  So it’s not surprising they don’t like these new features.  I’d be willing to bet that 99% of Facebook users don’t know what RSS is.

As with any new feature, it’ll take time before users get accustomed to it.  But hats off to the Facebook team for being the first to the market with these features.  Expect others to follow suit soon, regardless of the criticsm.