This last week I had my one month anniversary at Microsoft. I put off writing a post about the process and my new job because I wanted to do it after a few weeks of work and settling in. So what better time then at one month. I figured I would cover the process of getting the job and what I do at my job. Please feel free to ask any questions you want.
Okay, lets start with how I got the job. After graduating college I started email correspondence with ScottGu to ask for some advice about how to be successful and enjoy what you do. To my delightful surprise I was getting several page emails with very valuable information (in my opinion he is the most devoted developer in the community). One thing lead to another and he ended up putting my resume in the system, I'm sure it was because of my ability and charm not the referral bonus (jk Scott).
I was contacted by several groups inside the UIFX teams and had several phone interviews back and forth. After about a month I was invited up to Redmond to interview with the UIFX QA team. Now here is where I will be completely honest, I was just like every other developer out there and carried a stigma about QA. let me just tell you this, after meeting with them and having worked for them for a month QA developers are some of the best programmers out there! QA devs have to understand how the software will be used and all the crazy ways it will be used in addition to understanding the low level of how it was implemented.
So the day of my interviews was one of the most nerve racking days of my life. Walking in all you know is that you will have at least three interviews, you might have more but its not for sure. For me the first interview was the worst, I wasn't sure what they were looking for and I was asked questions that I was not expecting. I was expecting more questions about the framework itself however they were more general program questions. The first question I was asked was to implement, in any language I wanted, a bit array class with focus on the getIndex method and efficiency. Looking back on it, it wasn't that hard of a question but I was nervous and it caught me off guard. For those of you who are wondering look up bit shift operators. Any way to keep a long story half way short I returned home and got a call the next day offering me the position.
Okay so now for some interesting stuff, what I actually do all day long. Well besides drink the free coffee and soda and play foosball I am an SDET (Software Development Engineer in Test) for the UIFX Server team. That just a fancy way of saying the ASP.NET and Silver light team, we are working on changing our name to just ASP.NET. To set things straight no I don't just write unit tests all day long. Unit tests are mainly written by the developers themselves. We were refer to our job as being the first customer of the product or feature. We still write automated tests both for runtime functionality, method calls do the right thing, and design time tests, making sure the product or feature works properly with the IDE. However we have adopted the idea that we are the first customer so we also create sample applications and simply use the feature or product and log issues.
My first month has not been what I expected. First off I imagined that the honeymoon phase would have wore off by now but it still doesn't feel like work to me. Now don't get me wrong I am not complaining about this I want this phase to last as long as possible. The second thing that I didn't expect was to have the level of responsibility that has been assigned to me in the first month. Currently, I am responsible for anything to do with page framework, so all the basic controls and features of ASP.NET. Another thing that was surprising to me was the sheer amount of resources available to you as a Microsoft employee. Everything from cell phone plans to books to hardware to training. I will say that working for a big corporation has its perks! One thing that throw me off guard and is possibly my favorite part about working for Microsoft is the people that I get to interact with everyday. I hadn't put much thought into it so I guess that's why I didn't expect it but I get to work with basically ever person on my blogroll. Everyday I am surrounded by some of the smartest people in the ASP.NET world! Overall, I would have to say that there isn't a better job for me, I love working at Microsoft.