Showing posts with label microsoft. Show all posts
Showing posts with label microsoft. Show all posts

Monday, October 27, 2008

What It's Like To Work At Microsoft

Photo from The Seattle Times (GREG GILBERT / THE SEATTLE TIMES)

From Qbrundage:

Background

As a long-time Apple and UNIX user/programmer, I never aspired to work at Microsoft. (And I'm still a little surprised to be here.) I've never despised Microsoft like so many people seem to do — it's just that Microsoft products weren't a part of my world.

Then my wife got a job at Microsoft, so I needed to leave Caltech/JPL to work in Seattle. I didn't actually apply to Microsoft — a friend of ours who worked there circulated my résumé and Microsoft responded rapidly and set up a last-minute interview. Although I had five other offers, Microsoft made the best impression.

And so, here I am. I've been working at Microsoft since October, 1999 as a full-time Software Design Engineer. In that time, I've worked for three teams in two divisions, and had six or seven different managers. Four products I've worked on have shipped, two more are in beta, and I've also "consulted" for many other teams across the company, thereby influencing directly and indirectly a large number of Microsoft's products.

Between my experience and my wife's, I think I've gotten a pretty solid feel for what it's like to work in a product group at Microsoft.

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Monday, September 22, 2008

Return Of The ’70s Weirdos

From Newsweek:

That photo of 11 weirdos in '70s clothes you may have seen on the Internet really is the original Microsoft team, snapped Dec. 7, 1978, on the eve of the company's move from Albuquerque, N.M., to Seattle. Almost 30 years later, a few weeks before Bill Gates's departure from Microsoft, the group (looking better) reconvened.

Bob Greenberg (center of old photo, in red sweater), then a programmer and now a tech and financial consultant, had won a photo portrait in a contest and used it to commemorate the soon-to-be disrupted group. The picture was shot in a shopping mall.

"The photo really does capture a moment of time and the spirit we had in the office," says cofounder Paul Allen (bottom right), now a media and sports mogul. Signing up for a little company in the then unknown field of PC software was a crazy leap of faith. "I could have had an office and a title from a respectable company—but I thought this would take off," says programmer Gordon Letwin (second row, right). He stuck around Microsoft until taking leave in 1993. Bob O'Rear (second row left, above Gates), the most experienced of the group (he'd been a NASA engineer, now he's a cattle rancher), concurs—sort of. "My concept of success for us was that someday we'd have 40 people or so."

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