Surviving at Microsoft: Knowing who has the answer

You can't know everything. And in a place like Microsoft, chances are you'll need to get a fact or an opinion on something that you know very little about. Knowing who to ask is an important survival skill around here. As I've gotten better at this, it's helped me in other parts of my life too: let me tell you the story of the stripped oil pan bolt.

I drive a mildly exotic car, so repair bills can add up quickly. Last week, I took it in for a routine oil service at a local independent service center. When they removed the oil pan bolt, part of the threading in the oil pan bolt came out along with the bolt. This is usually the fault of the guy who did the previous oil service: they over-tightened the bolt. This spells trouble.

When they called, they told me that they would have to replace the oil pan. Now, for my car, this runs about $1800 before taxes (the front axle runs through the oil pan, so it's a major piece of work). I had them order the part, but since it wouldn't arrive until this week, I wound up using my Microsoft Flex Pass which lets me ride the bus for free. More importantly, this bought me some time.

Over the weekend, I had a chat with my neighbor who is another car guy and I told him my story of woe. He suggested a fix, and gave me the name and number of a guy who he trusts. I called him up and he gave me some great general advice, but he referred me to a second guy who was the real expert. After a bit of talking, he confirmed my neighbor's suggestion (for those who are curious, it uses a TimeSert to fix the problem). I also asked him the precision question[1]: "Was there any cases where you couldn't repair a stripped oil pan bolt using a TimeSert?" No.

Armed with this data, I called up my service guy. He tried to defend his position using some technical details that I couldn't confirm (they ruled out using a TimeSert since it would be too 'tall' for the pan). The precision question was a life saver since I could simply say 'Bob over at Foo motors said that he can always repair this using a TimeSert'. And since Bob is an authority in the local area, it was hard for my service guy to refute. Worst case I could tow my car to Bob and get him to fix it.

Long story short, my service guy wound up calling Bob and getting the special TimeSert that Bob uses to fix this problem. This saved me over $1700 and my car runs fine today.

It's sometimes hard for folks new to Microsoft to be effective since they often don't know who to ask. It's also hard for some folks to admit that they don't know an answer by asking, which compounds the problem. Figuring this out is one of the first things that you should do once you get here. And if you don't know who to ask, I can volunteer my help :)

If you found this interesting, my team is expanding, and we have more openings in Dev, Test and PM. More on this in a separate post.

[1] There's a class here at MSFT that used to be called "Precision Questioning" that teaches this. Execs tend to use this a lot. The trick to detecting when someone switches into "PQ mode" is hearing type information embedded in the question - eg "How many bugs are left?" (Integer) or "When will you ship?" (DateTime).

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Distributed version control systems are all the rage with the kids these days. They are an awesome piece of technology, not so much so for their technical accomplishments (which are very cool) but more so about how they enable folks to collaborate and how they fit well into the social structure of geeks. For some entertaining insights into GIT, one of the more popular DVCS's see this talk that Linus Torvalds gave on the social implications of GIT at this talk that he gave at Google. He does spend time bashing CVS and SVN in the talk, but that made the talk more fun for me :)

Comments

[Lawrence Oluyede]

How big is the IronRuby team? And the IronPython one?

I'm pretty curious :-)

[Darren Neimke]

Nice post John, I posted a an article that was on a similar theme recently.

http://showusyourcode.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!15630F96CB7D86C1!702.entry

If you read through to the link at the end about Paul Revere, it highlights that a good way to get started with knowing people is to start with the people who know people :-)

[John Lam]

@Lawrence: IronRuby is 4 people depending on how you measure it. IronPython is less than that depending on how you measure it (which we intend to fix).

@Darren: The Paul Revere anecdote is wonderful. Thanks for the ptr!