Near the end of my Amazon gig, a friend of mine from university heard that I may be looking for a new job. She worked across the Puget Sound at Microsoft, and as luck would have it, her team was hiring. I was still fresh out of college, a small fish in a big pond, a fish out of water. But I had heard about how you could get much more money just by switching companies. Even right out of college, one could have multiple tech giants jumping at the chance to hire them, waving wads of cash most graduates would kill for. Naturally I took that chance.
Rolling out the red carpet
The interviews went smoothly — there were some fairly standard coding problems such as checking for intersections of rectangles, navigating a two-dimensional array in a spiral, and such. I hit it off with the guy who would be my manager, who was friendly and sociable in a way that was quite different from the usual. And then, the last interview of the day was with someone at a director level. That surprised me, because I was interviewing to be just an ordinary Software Development Engineer in Test (or SDET). Perhaps it had become tradition for this fellow to personally speak to each new hire. Whatever it was, I was a bit intimidated, but he seemed to like me.
As a side note, you’re probably wondering… isn’t that a title downgrade from before? You would be absolutely correct. At the time, whenever one sees the word Test, certain biases immediately emerge. However, shortly after I left Microsoft, they merged the titles together, and all the SDETs became regular SDEs. But I will forever wear that Test blemish on my career. That’s another topic, of course.
Fake it till you make it
The very next day after I completed my interviews, they sent me an offer — and it was much more than what I was getting paid at Amazon. All this, despite it being Test. I accepted the offer without hesitation. I called up my friend to tell her the good news. Then, while reading my offer letter again, it occurred to me that I had never once considered the question: what was my job going to be? I was so caught up in the prospect of 1) leaving Amazon, 2) working in the same place as my friend, and 3) being paid more, that I forgot I would actually need to work. According to the offer letter, it had something to do with cloud and business stuff. Whatever. There was no point thinking about it too much. You only really know once you’re there; this was true for my Amazon gig as well. Oh well, I will just have to deal with it when the time comes, right?
This was my second job, but it was also my first time being a job hopper, which was the hot new thing. Job hoppers were people who, for various reasons, repeatedly changed jobs after staying for a short period of time. (Don’t kid yourself — at least ninety-nine percent of the time it’s about money.) I had stayed at Amazon for merely seven months. I was still inexperienced, yet I was already a veteran. I was in demand, and it felt good. I turned in my resignation to Amazon, spent my last two weeks there with a smile, and before I knew it I was off to Redmond. And as they say a lot in corporate America, fake it till you make it. Little did I know, just how much.
Settle in or die trying
The pay was an upgrade, and so was the workplace — I was getting my own office! With a door and everything! Granted, I would leave this door open most of the time, but it’s the having it that really counts. I had my own desk and computer, and a whiteboard too. Talk about fluffing up my ego… The Microsoft campus was huge compared to that of Amazon, probably to accommodate all these offices. There were many buildings in the headquarters at Redmond, and many more spread out around Puget Sound. I forgot which building I started off in, but I do remember that we moved once and we ended up in Building 41.
As with any complex environment, settling in took a while. On the first day I met with my immediate coworkers, explored my surroundings a bit, hung out with my friend. The project I was to be working on fell under the umbrella of Cloud and Business Development, or something to that effect. The test team alone was quite large. The development and test staff occupied the entire first floor of the building. I was placed in an office on the other end of the building from my immediate coworkers, so we had to walk a long way to visit each other in person. A minor inconvenience, but at least it gave me an excuse to pass by the kitchen where there were free canned beverages — an upgrade from Amazon — as well as a vending machine with snacks, which I ended up using often.
I set up my computer and my development environment. It was all Microsoft stuff — Windows, Visual Studio, C#, PowerShell. I was working on a small part of an enormous project. I tried to familiarize myself with what everyone was working on, but it was all a mystery to me and I didn’t want to bother people too much. Don’t sweat it, my manager told me. Just take it easy, and you’ll settle in.
Now I know there was a reason my friend didn’t talk much about what things were actually like over here.