Thrown into the fire

So my first week at Microsoft has been one hell of a week. I went through 1.5 days of NEO (New Employee Orientation), be placed into an office that I’m sharing with Cleve (hopefully I’ll get my own office soon, but we’re crammed for space in the building), and be placed on my first development team. At this time, I found out that we’re right in the middle of the spec creation, so trying to pick up the project & learn all my NEO stuff in just 2.5 days has been real fun. The experience is truly different from that of anything I’ve done before…as there’s really nothing like sitting in the lounge all day whiteboarding ideas and writing tech specs.

I’ve also found out that working longer hours is just the culture there, yeah yeah – I knew it was going to be like it, but I didn’t realize how tiring it was going to be. What I do like is the flexibility of hours, as I have to be there 8 hours (or more), but am required to be there from 10–4. BTW, if you’ve never heard so many acronyms in a single day, go work for Microsoft…you’ll get lost within the first 15 minutes.

Okay, its bed time now because I need to head into the office early and take care of some things prior to be in the lounge all day spec’ing things out.

6 Comments

  • Oh man I don't miss the acronym soup...worked in PSS a while back, everything was referred to as some sort of TLA (three letter acronym). If you hunt around, there's an internal MS website devoted to all the TLA's thrown around, don't remember the address offhand though.



    Sounds like you're having fun...well done.

  • My biggest acronym nightmare came while I was at Progressive. Not only are there letters for every part of the company, but each system within that part. Fortunately they were getting away from that. Our system was going to be called "PolicyPro," and that was our group name. Not surprisingly, it was short for "policy processing."



    That was a long way from the gig I had before that, where we called servers by planet names and laughed every time we said, "The file is on Uranus." Heh heh.

  • Great to hear you're having fun and being challenged. It's only about 3 weeks till I am in a similar scenario, though we are goign to be getting ready to launch a product. I can only imagine the firehose I will have to drink from. Anyhow if you haven't met "The Man" by the time I arrive we should introduce ourselves and meet "The Man".

  • Dont like rooming with me? ;-)

  • What's sad, Cleve, is that this is the most discussion we've had since Wed...we're just too darn busy.

  • Ugh, don't meet the man other than the "bonding over pain" hehe. I like a hot sauce mind you, I lived in New Mexico for 4 years, but I like a hot sauce with some flavor.



    The meat at Dixie's is GREAT though.

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