It is currently a little over a month into my full time employment at Microsoft, and I am extremely pleased with everything that I am working on. For those that don’t know yet, I work on the installer for the Windows Live team.
Fringe Benefits
I am going to go out on a limb and say that what I enjoy the most at Microsoft are the fringe benefits. This includes things such as a laid back atmosphere (I wear a t-shirt and jeans every day), free soft drinks (Coke AND Pepsi products, though I usually drink milk or juice), riding the connector, awesome club membership, and people who are much, much brighter than I am.
Another “benefit” is that I now get to be on the “inside” of everything that’s going on at Microsoft. I have already been given a demo of Windows 7 (WAY more than just a new touch screen) and I have daily builds of every Windows Live application available (Live Writer is sweet).
The Work
Although I can’t discuss details of everything that I work on, I can say that I learn so many new things every day. My first day at work, my mentor and boss gave me a set of books to get me familiar with what types of things I will work on.
Those are just the books that I got on my first day – more have arrived and more are on order. Needless to say, I probably don’t have an excuse for not being busy :P.
My day-to-day work consists of Win32 (obviously)/C++/COM work, which before I started I had no experience. After digging my heels in for a month and wondering around a forest of code, I have made some clearings and know a few different pieces of a lot of code.
One aspect of working at Microsoft that I have enjoyed so far is that I have gotten to be in control of what I am doing, and people trust me to complete my assignments. This is obviously a scary feeling when I dig into a bug, or adding new functionality in an area of code I haven’t even looked at, but up to this point I have managed to not hose the build system too terribly.
About the only thing I am not enjoying are some of the tools we have to use. I have always been a Subversion or Mercurial guy, and the version control we use just doesn’t cut it. From looking at the commands, there are sometimes three commands that do the same thing, just slightly differently. Why create a whole new command when a flag would do? I am already thinking about making Mercurial manage Source Depot.
The Future
Each team around here is scrambling to finish the current milestone (most teams it’s this week with others next week), which has given me an opportunity to see a coding milestone from start to finish. The race has been interesting and has kept me on my toes. I look forward to my continuing adventures at Microsoft.