18 Years at Microsoft

I remember my first day at Microsoft. September 13th, 2005. I took a taxi to Sigma building and was greeted by Linda Mao - a fellow PM who was tasked with making sure I felt welcome and that I got onto the bus to the airport. A typhoon caused our flight to be delayed and then eventually canceled. So, we ended up flying to Shanghai and taking a small bus to our hotel near Huangshan (Yellow Mountain). The bus ride was six hours and my seat would not stay prone so I sat as if on a bench seat the entire time. We arrived at the hotel at 3 or 4am, caught a few hours of sleep, and were ready for the kickoff event at 8:30am. It poured, I mean poured like through everything, on our hike the next day. Like many things, best laid plans went sideways and we adapted.

First day on the job - Internet Image

In April 1999, I left my small apartment on 49th Street in Oakland and headed to the second adult job I ever had - to be a developer at Internet Image. I drove the one mile to MacArthur station and took BART to Fremont. I then walked the 1.5 miles to the office arriving around 9am. In another life the office could have easily been a dental office or an escrow company. There was no one at the front desk, and no one in the office I could see at all.

How it ended - Take 2

Here’s what seems like the more politically correct or self reflective version of how my career at Microsoft ended. It may also be more divisive.

I went from someone obsessed with the job, to someone who didn’t want to do it anymore.

I went from someone that could do anything, to someone that could do nothing.

I went from someone propelled by self-doubt to someone who is at peace.

How it ended - Take 1

I’m sharing how things ended with me at Microsoft, and it didn’t end great. If it was good it wouldn’t have ended; at least not quite yet.

I have a love/hate relashionship with work. In my early years, the amount of work and the weight of the work was crushing and I’d just want it to stop. I did stop once in 2005 when I moved to Beijing and again in 2010 when I left Microsoft for the first time.

Victim Mentality

It’s 2013 or 2014 and I’m participating in a Microsoft people discussion offsite. There are maybe 20 of us there, M1s and M2s. I am a Lead Program Manager. We are having an open discussion on what impacts performance and I ask something like “how does the strength of directs impact a lead’s ability to have impact?”. The three GPMs sitting at the table all turn to me and in what seemed like unison say “that’s victim’s mentality”.

Becoming Chris Nichols

It is maybe 1992 and I am a System’s Engineer with the VM Systems group for Bank of America. I worked in the operating systems part of the group, something I took pride in and derived ego from. Chris sat in the next row of cubicles from mine. I didn’t know much of what he did day to day, besides being the CMS guru. (if you don’t know what CMS is, it was the PC operating system on mainframes before PCs)

First day on the job - Bank of America

It was January 9th, 1989 and time to go to work. I had graduated in May of 1988 with a computer science degree and after several months of job searching, landed in the Entry Level Training program at Bank of America. The previous Friday, I moved out of my parents house packing second hand household goods into my 1969 Dodge Dart. I have no recall of how I spent that first weekend. I do remember going shopping at Safeway on Friday night and getting a frozen pizza. Cooking the frozen pizza only to realize I didn’t have oven mitts nor a knife to cut it with.

First day on the job - MechanicNet

It was early 2003 and my old boss, former Internet Image CEO Lung Tsai called me. I answered on my Sprint One feature phone. He was trying to recruit me to his new company, MechanicNet. It was small - 10ish full time employees. They had some big deals lined up and needed a Director of Engineering. It would pay 90-95K USD plus stock options. I was making double that as a contract programmer at the time, so I politely declined. It was nice to feel wanted and my ego liked the title.

The Kirby Wiese Question

Early in my career, my mentor was a wonderful woman named Maria Wiese. She was married to Kirby Wiese and he was “a guy”. “A guy” in that he had a strong technical and leadership skills. While I didn’t get to work with Kirby much since I was in the sequestered VM/CMS systems group, I knew of his reputation. He knew things. One day I found myself in his office. I don’t recall exactly why, maybe it was to ask a question, maybe he saw me on the floor and asked me in. I have a strong impression of his office. Large (for tech), perfectly rectangular, with a large desk centered in the room. He sat behind the desk, also centered, and we exchanged some small talk. I was young and despite my obvious limitations was performing really well. It was possible I could eventually become “a guy”. A Kirby Wiese.

The Paper Route Years

Two bundles of papers dropped in the driveway. My elder brother Matt would bring them into the “new room” and fold them (the “new room” was a converted garage my parents had made into an extra room for the house).

Fold them meant roll them and place a rubber band around the paper. Or slide them into a plastic bag if it might rain. He’d load the papers into a cart for delivery purposes. An early aside is needed for the cart. The cart was a 1970’s era supermarket cart. A big, metal crate on rubberized wheels. Something like this: