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The first day...

Tuesday, March 15 2005 - blog

Today marks my first day as a Microsoft employee (and I have the "escort not required" sticker to prove it!). It also marks the beginning of my "life at ms" category, which I will be using from time to time.

A good chunk of today was spent in New Employee Orientation, or NEO. Beyond the standard new employee stuff about benefits (which are quite nice!) and whatnot, there are two major takeaways from NEO. Number one, it makes it clear that Microsoft is a big fan of the "total immersion" approach. Number two, it really drives home just how big this thing called "Microsoft" actually is.

Basically, NEO consists of about 6 hours of HR people throwing lots of information at you in a rapid-fire fashion. It's pretty much a bulk-load session; there's a lot of information to absorb. Fortunately, there's also a lot of pointers to external resources which keeps the whole thing from being too overwhelming. But I think it's definitely a metaphor for the style and intensity that characterizes Microsoft culture -- which is one of the reasons why I came to MS.

The other thing that left NEO with was a newfound appreciation for the sheer scale at which Microsoft operates. Just today, there were 94 new hires...a larger than average week, sure, but still just a week. Those people come from all over the world and work in seven different multi-billion dollar businesses...I always knew Microsoft was big, but I have a little bit of a different perspective on it now that I'm inside. It's pretty amazing to think about the kind of reach that comes with being a company that size, and the resources now available to me as a small part of it.

Or rather, the resources that will be available to me as soon as my network account gets activated (tomorrow morning, hopefully). Since I previously had a summer internship with MS I'm technically a returning employee which causes some delays in getting my accounts activated. As a result, I spent the day in "network purgatory" but hopefully that will be cleared up soon. I don't get my blue badge until Wednesday, so I have these attractive stickers with my name an "no escort required" on them to tide me over until then.

Regardless of my technical status of "non-existant" as far as the network is concerned, everyone here has been very quick to offer warm welcomes and make me feel part of the team. I even ran into Don Box coming out of 43 and got an improptu "welcome to the team" hug. Overall, it's very cool to be a part of this thing called Indigo now after spending quite a bit of time as a somewhat privileged outsider.

I have no doubt that I'm about to embark upon the biggest challenge yet in my professional career. But it's a challenge I know I'm capable of meeting, and that's actually a pretty empowering feeling. It's going to be a good ride :)

 

Tagged as:

#1 Scott on 3.15.2005 at 7:32 AM

hmmmm, I suppose this means I'll have to move you from my "non-MS Bloggers" into my "MS Bloggers" folders on Bloglines.Man, first Rory now you. They're dropping like flies.

#2 Andy on 3.15.2005 at 7:54 AM

Congrats on your new job. I hope it works out well for you. Now you just need to hook up with this guy:Joe Duffy who also works at MShttp://www.bluebytesoftware.com/blog/default.aspxHe is writing a Scheme interpreture for .Net in his spare time. I know at one time you were interested in doing the same thing. The two of you could get together and finish that interpreture he's working on and then release it for Beta testers. I personally volunteer my services to test it out if it ever gets to a beta stage. *hint hint nudge nudge wink wink*

#3 mearls@hotmail.com (Michael Earls) on 3.15.2005 at 8:59 AM

Congratulations.I dreamed about MS NEO last night.It was definitely a dream, though, because it looked like a cross between Mardi Gras and Burning Man.

#4 Ben Reierson on 3.15.2005 at 9:04 AM

Just be careful what you say in the first few days. You don't want to end up like Mark Jen! :) jk

#5 Ed Dodds on 3.15.2005 at 10:40 AM

So let me see, the first day at a knowledge management firm which sells information software they put you in a room and talked at you? Hmmm... there's this thing called a corporate intranet; I hear Microsoft makes this product called Sharepoint and...

#6 Steve Maine on 3.15.2005 at 8:36 PM

Ed -- ironically, it was Kurt DelBene (the Corporate VP in charge of Office Server, including Sharepoint) who did some of the talking yesterday :) The MS corporate intranet is really quite a think to behold. There are something like 130,000 different Sharepoint team sites deployed on it.Now that I finally got my network privileges today I can finally take advantage of that.

#7 Daniel Moth on 3.20.2005 at 11:03 AM

It all sounds like you are joining a new company. Kind of an obvious statement but I would have thought it would be more like moving to a sister company since Avanade is part-owned by MSFT; where is my erroneous assumption?

#8 Steve Maine on 3.20.2005 at 4:34 PM

Daniel -- in many ways you're right. Avanade is partially owned by Microsoft, so it's sort of like moving to a sister company. A very BIIIIG sister :)