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.

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.

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.

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.