The Long Road - Part 3: Focusing
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.
