The Long Road - Part 1: Beginnings
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.
