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The highest reward for a man's toil is not what he gets for it, but what he becomes by it. |
Wednesday, November 19, 1997
Things are quiet at work. Too quiet. We just finished off an important milestone, so many folks are out and the planning for the next thing is just getting going. I want to do more stuff for the team internal website, but I'm not making much progress. I went around asking people if they needed help with anything, but no go.
I usually keep Newslinx Web News up on my secondary machine all day, to keep up to date with what is happening on the web. I also read the html and stylesheets newsgroups, along with IE related newsgroups on msnews.microsoft.com. Plus there are internal mailing lists to monitor, answering question when I can. A text string manager is a very handy tool for this; all those pointers and FAQs can go in Canned Text Manager and are available in two clicks! (Canned Text Manager is an internal tool developed by some MS guys. Maybe http://www.windows95.com/ has something similar?)
Another favorite work-related site is http://www.scripting.com/. I enjoy reading Dave Winer, and I'm eagerly awaiting the beta of the Frontier scripting language for Win platforms. I'll experiment with putting this whole site into Frontier!
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I saw an amusing car on the commute home the other night. It was a modern van of rounded outlines, dark purple in color. The license plate: "EGGPLANT" ! I thought that was great! I've never felt impelled to name my computers or vehicles, maybe because I usually only have one at a time. "My car" is enough of a signifier to make it clear. Luke has named his pickup truck "Raven," but I don't know if he is thinking of getting vanity plates for it.
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I got a good workout at dance class tonight. The intermediate swing we are learning has a lot of spinning for the follow, and I'm weak in that area. I'd also like to keep reviewing things we've already learned, but I guess that's why I am repeating the beginning class. The Lindy Hop is a complex dance, with lots of things going on at once. I'm slowly becoming a little more comfortable with it.
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Someone was asking me (in connection with asking me about the agency I contract for) how I had got the assignments I've had at Microsoft.
My first assignment was as a proofreader, CD-ROM products, consumer division; 1993. I was hired because I had my music degree on my resume, and the team porting the classical music CD-ROM didn't have anyone with music experience to check if the little boxes were moving across the screen in correct synchronization with the melody. This was supposed to last three weeks! I went from proofreading to text prep over the course of four products in one year; that is, from finding the errors, to fixing the errors, to committing the errors. I'm sure I got a raise somewhere in that year.
I went from there to Cinemania for one product cycle, most of 1994. After that, I sent out mail to people I knew in the consumer division, talking briefly about my skills and saying I was looking for an assignment.
I joined the ms complete gardening team in December 1994 as text prep lead and assistant to the content coordinator. (I knew the content coordinator from Cinemania and he probably recommended me.) I continued there till we shipped in early 1996. I got a lot of good experience there helping the content developer take the mass of text (Word docs that orginally came from Quark, I think, as a series of book manuscripts) and massage it into the format needed for the product. Word macros, Access queries, SGML processing, fun stuff!
I went from there to the MSDN product website (which does not now resemble what I worked on). I got that job via recommendation from someone I knew before I came to MS (we had worked at the same legal publishing firm, she was now an editor for msdn.)
At the end of 96 I sent mail to the woman who had been Program Manager on the gardening cd. I don't remember who expressed interest first, but she definitely wanted me on her part of the IE team, which was gratifying.
So some jobs come from a personal connection; some are a natural progression. Probably other people have gotten higher rates in similar assignments, but I'm satisfied with what I have made.
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