One Man Shouting

This series of posts will be a mini-history of my career, and the long path that led me to Microsoft. It's about me, so I feel a bit weird posting it, but I think there might be some useful information here for others who are trying to steer their careers in the right direction. (Link to Part 1, Link to Part 2, Link to Part 3)

After taking a bit of an emotional and mental breather from the Microsoft job hunt, I happened upon a blog post on MSDN talking about some openings in Charlotte, NC.  This was interesting on several fronts.  First of all it led me to read a bit about the Microsoft Campus in Charlotte.  I’m not sure on all of the statistics, but it’s one of the largest sites outside of the Puget Sound area.  Secondly the job actually sounded like it might be a great fit for my technical skills and passions.  The team does developer support, and required ability to understand mail protocols and API’s, which I had previous experience with.

I contacted the blog author, passed along my resume, and proceeded through the process: An email screen, a phone screen, a more in-depth phone screen with several engineers.  I was then scheduled for an on-site interview!

After flying to Charlotte I arrived at the Microsoft campus extra early.  I called and talked to my wife from the rental car for a few minutes, and then about 10 minutes until 9:00am I decided to head into the lobby.  This, ironically, is the part of the day I have the most detailed memories about.  That’s because it didn’t really go according to plan.  The main visitor entrance was under construction, so I followed the signs down to the next entrance only to find that it was locked.  I scanned around for people, looked for other signs, and eventually found a call box on a pillar outside the door.   I hit the button, told the person that answered that I was trying to get to the lobby.  They said that someone was supposed to be at the door already but that they would check on it.  So I waited some more.  I should mention that I hate being late for anything.  I try to be early, and I was especially intent on being early this day.  So much for planning.  As the clock ticked past about 9:03 one of Microsoft’s facilities team happened by (on his way in from checking on the construction at the other entrance) and he asked if I needed any help.  I quickly explained that I was trying to get to the lobby, and he very helpfully escorted me to the lobby.  I signed in, took several deep breaths and sat down to wait for another 10 minutes or so before the interviews started.

This was different from my previous interview experiences in that everything was done panel-style.  I think this is telling of the teamwork dynamic of the team I eventually joined.  Two engineers started asking questions, seeing what I knew, and quickly progressing to the edges of what I didn’t know.  We spent enough time on the edge of what I knew that I left each session not really knowing how well I had done.  Two or three more engineers took a second session, and after that I moved on to meet with the hiring manager.

Now, I’m going to highlight how much of this day I can’t remember.  I have worked daily over the past 2.5 years with the individuals that interviewed me on that day, but I could only hazard a guess as to who was in the interview loop.  What I do remember is that on this day I totally let my guard down.  I articulated what I knew, wasn’t afraid to say “I don’t know”, or to guess and vocalize my reasoning.  I talked about what I was passionate about & what excited me about this position.  I didn’t posture myself how I though they might want me to be, but just tried to be raw and unguarded.  By this point in my journey I figured that I wanted to be hired for who I was, not for how well I could interview.

In the end it paid off. I received an offer and accepted a short while later. The next few months were a blur.  Temporary housing, selling one house, buying another, and many trips back and forth between NC and MD.  My wife did and absolutely awesome job through the move managing our three small kids and all the loose ends that are inevitable with a move.  We had Christmas 2007 in temporary housing, and closed on our house a few days later.

My first few years at Microsoft have been awesome, and I know that this is just the beginning of a long and exciting journey.

A few weekends back I spent the morning fixing a drippy ice maker in our Whirlpool Gold Side-by-Side refrigerator, so I figured I’d do another “fix-it” post. 

One morning when I opened the freezer there was a bit of a winter wonderland scene, with frost and icicles covering the upper-right corner of the freezer.  The in-door ice bucket was full of huge chunks of refrozen ice, and frozen up to the point where it couldn't move the agitator to dispense ice.  Pretty much just an icy mess.

I originally thought that maybe someone had left the freezer a bit open, but there was still a bit of water dripping around and I know the door had been closed before I opened it.

Still not knowing what was wrong, I removed the ice bucket, emptied it out and melted all of the ice that was frozen around the agitator.  I put it back in the freezer and then went about my morning.  A bit later, I went to get some ice and remembered that I hadn't turned the  ice maker back on, so I hit the switch.  I closed the door and waited for the ice to drop (It's an in-door bucket so it doesn't drop until the door closes).  Right when the ice dropped I opened the door and was then able to see first-hand the real problem with the dispenser.

Evidently in this model fridge, the water is dispensed into a small collector that then lets it flow into the ice tray.  The collector is circled in orange in the picture below.  Somehow this collector had filed with a solid chunk of ice, and was blocking the flow of water directly into the ice tray.  Since the float switch to stop the flow of water is in the tray, this means that the water stays on until enough water dribbles around the collector to fill up the ice tray (as well as coating a good portion of the freezer with water.

At first I thought I could attack this with a hair-dryer, but after removing all of the food from the top two shelves and then sitting with a hair dryer on the collector for about 5 minutes, I realized this was not getting me anywhere.  My next idea worked much better.  I used a turkey baster to squirt near-boiling water into the top of the collector (with towels positioned below to catch the overflow) and this unfroze the collector in about 2 minutes.

We haven't had any further problems with the ice maker.  I'm not sure if this was just a fluke, or if there's some sort of accumulation of ice in the collector that will come back again, but for now it's working great and I know how to fix it quickly it it freezes up again.

I've now seen this on two different cars of the same model & year and I couldn't find a reference to this specific resolution on the Internet so I figured it would be worth posting. 

The symptom is simple.  The power sliding door on one side or the other will stop working.  I'm guessing that this problem is shared between the Dodge Caravan and the Chrysler Town & Country since they share the same parts for this mechanism.  Some people on the Internet say that the problem went away after they had the dealer flash the BCM (Body Control Module).  Other people had to get an entirely new BCM before the problem disappeared. We never went down either of those paths since I had a simple quick, although temporary, fix.  If you open up the fuse panel under the hood next to the battery:

Then remove, count to 5 and then replace the following fuse:

The doors should work again for a while.

With the first van that had this problem, we went for many months just pulling and replacing the fuse whenever a problem occurred, and it would usually only stop working every few weeks.  A while later we ended up replacing the battery after the van wouldn't start one morning.  Since the door issue was only an occasional problem, I never really realized that it never happened after we got the new battery.

Fast forward a few years, and we ended up having to replace the van, and we opted for the same exact model & year.  When we had the "new" used van for a couple of weeks, the left power sliding door stopped working one day.  We were on a trip so I did the quick-fix fuse pull & replace, and the door started working again.  Within a week, the van wouldn't start one day.  A jump start got us working again, but I took the van to Auto Zone to have the battery checked, and it failed the load test.  I replaced the battery on this van, and we haven't seen the doors stop working again!

My guess is that the Body Control Module (BCM) that gets so much attention has a failure mode that is supposed to disable the sliding door motor if it detects a short or a stuck electric motor, but that when the van's battery starts getting marginal, it trips into this mode unnecessarily.

This series of posts will be a mini-history of my career, and the long path that led me to Microsoft. It's about me, so I feel a bit weird posting it, but I think there might be some useful information here for others who are trying to steer their careers in the right direction. (Link to Part 1, Link to Part 2)

After getting some more exposure to Microsoft as a company, and as a collection of really smart individuals, I get the idea in my head that I wanted to work for the Goliath.   I was constantly reading about Longhorn/Vista, or the next Live service, or Virtual Earth, and of all of the companies doing interesting things, Microsoft seemed like an awesome company to work for.  This draw was not without it's downsides though, considering the fact that my wife's family was all living in the same town in Maryland where she grew up and where we had started our careers and our family.  

In my mind, Redmond was the only place to go work for Microsoft, and I started fishing for interviews and trying to convince my wife that moving out to Washington state would be a great adventure.  Well, my wife humored me, although not extremely convincingly, and I managed to get an interview for a Program Manager position.  Leading up to the interview, I did everything I could to prep mentally and technically for the interview, even to the point where I spent the plane flight west "cramming" by reading yet another technical book about the technology the team developed.

The interview experience was fun, although I now know that at the time I didn't have the technical depth that was needed for this team.  Thanks to the cramming, I knew a lot of the stuff at an academic level, but I didn't really have experience with the technology at a deep level.  My loop ended a little after lunchtime, and I found out sometime later that I didn't' get the position.  Really this one was for the better.

I came back home, intent to re-focus on my career there, and it was quite some time before I started to get the "itch" again.  My next round started around the end of 2005.  By conversing with folks and reading blogs like the Microsoft Jobs Blog, I had come to an important realization of a problem with my previous approach. 

Microsoft, in general, has a ton of opportunities.  Even with our recent layoff announcement, we've still got over 700 positions posted on the external careers site, and usually that number is in the thousands.  The problem was that I read every job posting and considered it as a unique opportunity, and I evaluated whether I would like doing that better than my current job, and whether there was a reasonable fit between my experience and the skills required.  This is a problem because it didn't take into account my real passions and strengths.  This was even more of a problem for me because my background is very broad, and I'm interested in a huge variety of technologies.  Really if you told me that I could spend the rest of my career doing 3 month rotations on different teams throughout Microsoft, I would love it because I love getting exposed to a huge variety of technologies, problems, and people.  This facet of my personality led to to not be very focused in my job hunt, and it also left out an important part of the career equation.  The 3-month rotation scenario above might be very fulfilling to me, but what would it really offer Microsoft if every time I get ramped up enough to start being productive, I moved on to something new?

So, all of this leads me to the idea, and possibly the best advice I can give any prospective Microsoft hire.  You should not just focus on what you are good at, but you should focus on what you are best at.  You should not just think about what you are willing to do, but rather what you would love to do.  This is the best way to match your true passion with a potential opportunity, and when you find an opportunity with the right fit, it'll be that much more likely to happen.

So, this realization led me to my second interview opportunity.  I was in the midst of my MBA coursework and really focused on organizational theory and change management, and I found a Program Manager position that really fit with where I was focused at the time.  I was out in Redmond for a conference and managed to get an informational meeting with the hiring manager, and subsequently got scheduled for an on-site interview loop.  I honestly think this position was a great fit for my passion and personality, and to this day  think I would've managed to rock at it, but frankly I would've been at a huge disadvantage trying to fill that role without having first worked at Microsoft. It was a very business oriented role, and Microsoft's business is very different from what you see in most organizations. I guess it goes without saying that I didn't get this position, but again had an awesome time interacting with smart folks through a challenging interview experience.

Next time I get motivated to write on this topic, I'll cover the interview that finally landed me a position with Microsoft.

My trusty CX2620 has been serving the family well for almost 3 years now, but for about the last year the battery hasn't held a charge that would last more than 5 minutes.  I had attributed this to a bad battery, and with replacements going for around $150, I wasn't going to sink that much money into an obviously aging laptop. 

A combination of events recently lined up to get my laptop battery back in action.  Our original power adapter's cord had broken through the insulation around the place where the DC cord enters the adapter brick, so we ordered an el-cheapo replacement from Ebay.  This new adapter had the same specs as the original, and we managed to continue along, still not able to hold a charge, but functional while plugged in.

This new adapter only lasted a couple of weeks before giving out entirely right before we were going on a trip.  We decided against getting another cheap adapter, and put in a order for the original OEM spec adapter, to be shipped to one of the destinations on our trip.  When it wasn't there when we arrived I checked the order status to find that it was backordered for another 4 weeks.  Since we were suffering from laptop withdrawal, we ended up running out to Circuit City and picking up a Kensington Universal Notebook Power Adapter (K33404US).

Well, the new adapter is a 90 watt adapter, vs. the original 60 watt.  Low and behold, the battery will now hold a charge almost as good as when it was new!

Pretty much every time I notice something in the world that seems "broken" the analysis eventually leads me to think that the incentives are structured in a way that causes the brokenness.  Take the recent mortgage crisis, and look at what was driving the behavior of the key stakeholders:

Real Estate Agents:  Both buyers and sellers agents are paid a percentage commission on the sale price.  This means that the "knowledgeable representatives" on both sides have a financial incentive to get houses to sell at the highest price possible.

Mortgage Brokers:  Again, usually paid either a flat commission, or a percentage commission.  Either way, they earn exactly zero dollars for the mortgage they say shouldn't happen.

Mortgage Lenders: This group was a major part of the real problem.  Mortgage lenders, through bundling and selling of mortgage backed securities, had no incentive to turn away bad loans.  The mortgage backed securities were selling at a value that didn't account for the risk using standard economic formulas, so the lenders had an incentive to accept risky loans and sell them, passing the risk along to people who had no ability to understand the risk they were accepting. Basically the more they could get a potential homebuyer to promise to pay, the more money they made.  No incentives to push down the price of homes.

Appraisers: This is the group that should have been the safety net, but it seems that they've turned into yes-men (and women) for the Real Estate Agents and the Mortgage Lenders.  They are well insulated from liability by the formulas they use, and are dependent on Agents and Lenders for referrals so that they can make a living, so they have no incentive to challenge the value of an overpriced home.

Home Buyers: This group seemed, as a whole, to believe that as long as they planned to sell their house every few years, they should buy as much house as they could afford in order to maximize the future profit.  As a whole it looks like we bought into all of the advertising that claimed that houses were a great investment, touting huge yearly percentage gains in value, even though the fine print read "past returns are not a guarantee of future performance."  Greed, and the blind hope for turning a profit led this group to accept the inflated values as a reason to buy.

Home Sellers: Finally we get to the one group that should have been putting upward pressure on home values.

So, we now have a correction of sorts underway.  Home buyers are wary of getting into the market for fear that the values will continue to drop.  Mortgage brokers and lenders know they can't bundle and sell risky mortgages since there will be too much scrutiny, but they do seem to be trying to lock in anyone that has a good to excellent credit rating.  I haven't seen any real changes in the real estate market, but I'd be amazed if there isn't at least some fear of liability if an agent helps someone buy an overvalued home.

The current climate of fear and risk aversion has slowed the bad behavior, but nobody seems to be talking about fixing the system.  If we come out of this and the incentives haven't changed, then the bubble will just grow, and pop, again.

This series of posts will be a mini-history of my career, and the long path that led me to Microsoft. It's about me, so I feel a bit weird posting it, but I think there might be some useful information here for others who are trying to steer their careers in the right direction. (Link to Part 1)

After digging into the networking and security side of things for a while, I found more and more of my time being taken up by development projects, and although I had picked up quite a bit of knowledge about low-level networking and security, I felt that I would make better use of my talents by continuing to be involved on the software side of things as well. One of my former colleagues was getting ready to move to Florida and he was leaving an opening as a lead developer on a small simulation development project.  This was mostly a software project, but also had some specialized hardware components, and some networking angles as well.  This seemed like a good fit, and would allow me to return to more of a leadership role.

I had a great deal of fun and learned a lot with this role.  I was with a company that encouraged personal and career growth, and they paid for me to complete my Master of Business Administration (MBA) while I worked on a team that focused on developing simulation capabilities for a Navy aircraft.  Since I was someone who had both software development and networking experience, I got pulled in many different directions and worked on lots of very interesting and challenging projects. 

During this time I also got involved with blogging.  I used to read technology websites, and there was some mention on some fairly mainstream news site about a blogger at Microsoft who was giving a bit of a peek inside Microsoft.  I started reading this blog, and grew out from there, settling in at around 100 feeds with a constantly churning mix of individual bloggers & news sites.  Within a few weeks of starting to read blogs, I also started writing a blog called "Blobservations", originally at Bloglines, later at Blogger, and eventually settling at blobservations.com and still later transitioning to onemanshouting.com (now also accessible at rickhallihan.com).

Through participating in blogging, I was able to learn a lot about technology, the industry and also start getting some exposure as someone who thinks about and has opinions related to technology, programming, media, Internet, and any other random thing that I decided to spout off about.

I usually don't worry much about the traffic on my blog, but when I logged into the control panel today this caught my eye:

 Now I already was expecting a bit of a bump since Raymond had given me a heads-up about the link, but I'm always curious exactly what traffic a link will bring.  Between December 31st and New Year's Day about 900 extra views compared with my normal baseline is a pretty good reach for a pile-of-links post referral.  The results say a great deal more about Raymond's reputation for putting up interesting links than anything else!

This series of posts will be a mini-history of my career, and the long path that led me to Microsoft. It's about me, so I feel a bit weird posting it, but I think there might be some useful information here for others who are trying to steer their careers in the right direction.

After completing my Bachelor's degree in Computer Engineering, I started working for a small defense contractor in the town where I had attended Middle and High school.  My wife had family there, and it seemed like the logical place for us to start our careers.  My first job was not a very good fit for my personality, as I soon came to realize.  The decision to look at other options was both easy and hard.  I like challenges, but they have to be interesting challenges, and the particular assignment didn't provide the kind of experiences I was looking for. I had a great boss, and was working for a great company, but decided to move on to something different. 

My next move led me to a position where I got to work on developing software for flight simulators.  My wife was doing similar work in a different group, and she recruited me to work for the same company, in the same building, although we were on totally different teams.  This was an exciting job for me, and it was the first job where I got to take all the programming theory that I had learned in school, ignore 75% of it, and make use of the other 25% to actually make something work.  I learned a lot during my time on that team, but eventually decided to return to my original company to take a job that had more responsibility and was more product-focused, and less project-focused. 

In this next role, I learned about software engineering processes, change control, and got to live several iterations of build-test-release in maintenance mode on a software product.  I also got to get my feet wet on the program management side of things, tracking hours and budgeting for a small team.  As I was building experience as a software developer, I was also beginning to be very interested in networking and security.  I decided to start down the self-study road, and get my MCSE and learn more about networking and security.

After I had built up a fair working knowledge around networking and security, I wanted to put this knowledge to good use.  I took a position with another small company where I could leverage my new interests while still staying involved with development projects as well.  I got to learn about corporate networks, Active Directory, Group Policy, a little bit about Exchange and firewalls.  I was still straddling the fence between development and IT, and quite frankly, I liked the fact that I got to keep doing both.  It's this job that first exposed me to Microsoft as a real entity, not just some abstract idea of a company that produced software, but a real entity made up of people.  My boss at the time had some contacts at Microsoft and managed to get us several invitations to attend Microsoft's Security Summit out in Redmond.  Flying out to Redmond and meeting and listening to people who were truly passionate about the products and technology they were building was an inflection point in my thinking about my career.  I don't remember coming back thinking that I wanted to work for Microsoft, but Microsoft had become something real to me, and my perception was that it was made up of smart people who cared about making an impact.

I just finished up my first time attending Microsoft's Professional Developers Conference and wanted to capture a few random observations.

This conference is beyond huge!  I was trying to unit-ize my perception of the size, and all I could come up with is "several football fields" worth of people.

The conference was run very well.  The event staff did an amazing job.  I did notice that they held some pretty strict people-routing rules and some of the attendees would get upset when they were told to go to the center doors of the Big Room in order to get to a meal that was in hall G or K.  If you've ever been responsible for maintaining order with a large gaggle of people you would recognize that they were doing it right.  If you wait until the line becomes a problem, it's too late to fix it.  You have to send people along the path that a long line would take in order to keep this from becoming a problem.

The Cloud is coming.  Microsoft's Azure has a ton of promise and it'll be interesting to see how it rolls out over the next decade.  I've always been a big fan of Amazon's S3 and EC2, and it's awesome to see Microsoft hit this space with a coherent broad strategy that covers not just silo'd implementations of storage and computation, but an ecosystem that can field complex applications in the cloud, on-premises, or any combinations of the two.

When developers file into a room, they seem to default to a sort of "worst-fit" algorithm, filling up the rows of chairs in the least efficient manner possible, causing the presenters and coordinators to have to go through several rounds of defragmentation in order to get the room to capacity.

It was great to meet some of the other Microsoft bloggers that I've been following for years.  I went to Raymond Chen's talk even though it's been a long time since I wrote any code that even came close to a Win32 call, but it was an interesting talk just the same.  I also stopped by the Win7 table in the Microsoft Pavilion and shook his hand.  It was a bit of a geek fan-boy thing to do, but I've enjoyed reading his blog for a long time, and it was cool to meet the man behind the blog.  Raymond was very friendly and approachable, and it was interesting to see that his face-to-face personality matched up exactly with what I had come to expect from years of reading The Old New Thing.

Scott Hanselman's talk was awesome, entertaining, and educational all at the same time.  He's another of my favorite bloggers and I've been a subscriber since long before he joined Microsoft.  He was pretty busy after the session, so I didn't make the time to do the fan-boy introduction, but it was cool to see Scott in person.

I also got to meet Charlie Kindel.  It was a bit awkward since the last time we spoke I was an outside blogger who was spending a ton of time on Windows Home Server.  Since joining Microsoft last December, I really haven't made time to do much of anything related to Windows Home Server, so we didn't have much to talk about.  Still, it was good to finally meet Charlie and the WHS sessions at PDC were very interesting. (Developing Connected Home Applications and Services for Windows Home Server, Exposing Connected Home Services to the Internet via Windows Home Server) CJ and crew did a great job with the presentations and demos.  I'm still a huge fan of WHS as a key part of any home network, and as a central nervous system for the smart home going forward, I just don't have the time necessary to evangelize the platform like I did before.

The gender divide at the conference was very pronounced.  I've been in Microsoft's Charlotte office for nearly a year now and even though it's no where near 1:1 there, I've gotten acclimated to a less skewed environment enough that I really noticed the gap at PDC.  It's a shame that the industry is so far behind on this.

The geeks as a whole seemed to be making healthier choices from the provided snacks. The fruit tables seemed to get a fair amount of action, and the Ho-Ho's and Twinkies seemed to stay on the tables for quite a while longer.  I'm sure that plenty of extra calories were consumed this week, but it didn't seem to be too far off the unhealthy end of the spectrum.

The folks from the Dev Teams were here to really connect with customers.  The "Ask the experts" were the formalized version of this, but extended post-session Q/A sessions and lots of business card swapping means that real connections were being built.  It seems that if you came to PDC, you could reach out and get some real people to talk to about almost anything that Microsoft does.

Lots of international participation.  Hearing people having side conversations in various languages and then instantly switch to perfect English for another conversation reminded me how much it seems like Americans are behind the curve with languages.

That's it for my random observations. All in all it was a great conference!