John Lam on Software

My first week at Microsoft

Wow. It’s over. Finally. And now I can reflect back on my first week as a member of the collective. Here’s some photos of the campus back when there was snow:

Here’s Mt. Rainier towering over Building 42:

Here’s the mountains behind 156 Ave:

The implant didn’t hurt all that much. My first couple of days at Microsoft involved signing up for various things like benefits, payroll, and parking. It also involved going through New Employe Orientation, where you get to find out some more things about the history, size, and ‘diversity’ at the company, as well as things that you can and cannot (well more about the cannot part) do as a Microsoft employee – essentially your responsibilities as a corporate citizen.

Here’s a photo of Building 122:

Jon Udell was in my orientation class, and he had a great observation about just how confusing the benefits presentation was, and how it can be improved using social networking technology. The idea is to hook up people with similar life circumstances with each other so that they can discuss these things. For example a benefit like the flexible spending account is important to me since Matthew’s in preschool, but that same benefit would be unimportant to the new college hires that were in my orientation class because of their differing life situation.

I believe that some of this stuff can be answered using some of the internal mailing lists at Microsoft. As a new hire, I’m wary about drowning in email, so I’ve avoided (so far) signing up for those distribution lists. Instead, I’m relying on the ‘hallway advisors’ to help me out. There are a remarkable number of folks that I have met / know that have been out on paternity leave over the past year or so, so there’s no shortage of people in similar ‘family situations’ to me.

I managed to accidentally score a window office as my team is in the middle of an office move. I’ll enjoy it while it lasts – I suspect my new office will be next to the boiler room in the basement :)

One example of the sheer size of Microsoft involved getting my alias setup. The seven letters of my name (John Lam) are not unique enough to generate me an alias that would not be ambiguous or just outright silly (and I didn’t get an ambiguous alias). Thanks to some lobbying on the part of my manager’s manager, we fought the IT policy … and won!

I attended my first few team meetings as well, experienced the joys of observing a re-org that I wasn’t a part of (or frankly could really understand), as well as getting the experience of being the dumbest guy in the room. There’s an enormous amount of information overload as you walk into a world that, while somewhat familiar from the outside, is very different since everyone here is focused on what the outside world would call a ‘future release’. 

I’m also spending time figuring out what it means to be a ‘Program Manager’. I suspect that will take the longest amount of time to figure out. But as far as I can tell, it involves an awful lot of meetings :)

First day in Redmond

January 10 was my first day in Redmond. We (my dog Kobe and I) left home at around 3:30am EST and arrived tired but happy at Sea-Tac airport at 1:30pm PST. The poor dog was locked inside of his kennel the entire time, but he bounced back fast – he’s a Black Lab, and he’s a very resiliant and good dog.

Once we got to our temporary housing in Sammamish, we promptly got snowed in! This was not what we expected our first night in the Seattle area to be :) We had no food except for the little welcome package that our corporate housing company left for us. Fortunately for us, Dominos was delivering in the snow that night, so Kobe got a lot of human food that night!

The next morning, this is the scene that greeted us outside:

Here’s a photo of our temporary house:

Here’s a photo of the house across the street:

I really like this area that we’re living in (the Timberline region of Sammamish). However, as I discovered later this week, just getting down the hill from here (less than a mile) takes on average 15 minutes in traffic!

Total time into Microsoft averages 40 minutes in the morning. We’ll have to look for another area to live, as picturesque as this area is.

I need a new phone

Must … give … Apple … more … money.

Hope it’s at Apple stores when I get off the plane in Seattle tomorrow!

June? Yikes.

Simplicity

One of the nice things that you get from putting up with the giant hassle of moving is an opportunity to simplify your life. I just finished packing up all of my ‘non-essential’ computer gear. It’s remarkable how cathartic the experience was. I have a single computer running in the house right now (my MacBook Pro).

I had a couple of servers running downstairs with a ridiculously complex networking setup involving multiple wireless access points, switches and firewalls. I’m down to a single WRT-54G access point running my wireless network, and I’m typing this thing on my Mac. I brought my Samsung ML-2150 laser printer up from the basement where it has lived for the past 2.5 years and will plug it into my Mac whenever I need to print (lots of last minute scanning / printing / emailing to do before we go). When I get to Seattle, I doubt that I’ll miss those servers one bit, as they’re going into storage while we figure out where we’re going to live.

We’ll be moving into furnished temporary housing when we get to Seattle. All of the rest of our stuff will go into storage, only to re-emerge when we figure out where we’re going to live. So we’ll live for several months with nothing more than what we bring with us on the plane, and a couple of boxes of stuff that we’re going to ship to ourselves via UPS. It’s a great opportunity to see how little of our stuff we really need to live – especially the technology stuff.