Interview Diary - Microsoft 2005

When we moved, jobless and homeless, to Beijing in April 2005 I didn’t really have a plan. I was burned out on tech and thought I could take a couple of years to try different things before returning to the states. After a couple of months of boredom and negative case flow, my anxiety got me looking for a job. I spoke with an old boss who was helping establish the Google office in Beijing. They were not quite ready for me and I’m pretty sure I wasn’t ready for them. A family friend pointed me at Microsoft and even though I didn’t think I had much of a chance, I sent her my resume. A technical phone screen ensued. I don’t remember the details of the phone screen but remember at the end the interviewer (Jian?) said in response to my second question that there was no need to ask more questions, I had already passed. The next day or so I received an onsite interview invitation.

I’m of the generation that grew up with typewriters. In ninth grade one of my electives was typing. Along with wood shop. Seriously. Life skills. One day, we had a typing speed/quality exam and I got a head start. When the teacher said “go”, I was already on the second paragraph. She walked to my desk and ripped the paper out of the typewriter. It was the only time I was caught cheating in school.

It’s late November 2000 and I’ve returned home from my first two week vacation maybe ever. These were the days when you were not always connected to work - no email on my phone, no work text messages. I had landed at SFO from Beijing on a Sunday to be ready for work Monday morning.

Work being Intraware’s Fremont office. The office was pretty new for us, having recently moved from our startup’s location after Intraware acquired us. Right after the acquisition, there were plans for an office that could grow with our ambitions. By the time we closed on the space, we had scaled back our plans and the space considerably. Times were a changing.

After 11 weeks off, I was due back to the office on December 3rd. The thoughts of what I would do when I returned to the office ramped up in the weeks prior. Meet my directs one last time. Meet my manager and see if anything has changed. Take care of any managerial tasks. Give my official two weeks notice.

I slept well the night prior and people said I looked refreshed. I guess that’s what they would say to someone who had so much time off. The next night I could hardly sleep. The same for the rest of the week and by Friday I was back to my ragged work self of recent years as evidenced by this send-off photo.

This post, like most posts on this site is about my personal experiences. But before we go there, I want to make a few points.

• I am a fan of DEI.
• DEI has been called discriminatory. It’s been called that by those that discriminate.
• This is not to say DEI is not without problems.
• This is not to say everyone who argues against DEI is discriminatory or acting in bad faith.
• I find it shocking the number of organizations who bent the knee and spun 180 degrees on DEI.

In 1988 I was a fresh CS Graduate who had a few things going for me. I was earnest, I worked hard, I could code really well, and I had a knack of knowing what problem to solve. I had some things that held me back. I graduated from a state school with modest grades, I was an extreme introvert, and I was overweight. With that, I could not find a job until late in the year when Bank of America hired me as part of an engineering entry level employee program. In hindsight, it sure looked like what today we’d call DEI. They hired 50 people to take part in the program. It intentionally had a mix of backgrounds, including race, age, sex, work experience, and college degree. To get into the program, we all had to pass an aptitude test and then an onsite interview. It wasn’t easy. On my first day, I found myself in a group that included a couple CS majors, but also bank tellers, history majors, literature majors, and so on. There was a mix of the sexes, of orientations, of cultural backgrounds. 49 of the 50 made it through the three month training and we were placed in permanent positions and nearly all of us contributed significantly to the company. Bonds and connections were formed. I think of it as a model for a new hire program.

It is the fall of 2005 and I’ve just joined Microsoft China’s Advanced Technology Center (ATC) as a Program Manager. One of the suggestions I took was to go to lunch with all the other PMs on the team. So, one by one I schedule lunch and for those that know me, this will seem weird since I typically don’t do lunch (instead I would exercise and/or rebuild my mental sand castles).

The well worn dot matrix printer is connected to the 10 million dollar mainframe. We are single step debugging at the machine level and printing diagnostics. The diagnostics are for the microcode engineers back in Japan. The breakpoint hits. We execute the instruction. Ok. The next instruction XORs memory on itself (leaving 0s) followed by an instruction that restores the memory to the original value. The sequence is there to trick the system into thinking something changed so the memory won’t be paged out. We step into the XOR instruction but instead the system executes the one after it. Hmm.. did we all miss something. Then we execute the next instruction but the system goes backward and executes the XOR. It executed the two instructions out of order. That is not supposed to happen and blew my mind. And worse for our users, it left the 0s in memory instead of what should be there. And the 0s were a problem.

It is 1995 and I didn’t know what an introvert was even as I was looking at one in the mirror. I was debating on whether I should go to the conference’s evening activities. The conference was called “Share” and focused on IBM mainframe technologies. IBM and other vendors certainly had a presence and many informative sessions but the real value was the community. When I started as a VM/CMS system’s programmer I was handed a manual called “What mother never told you” by Marian Varian. It was given to me in an almost clandestine way for it was the book VM/CMS systems programmers learned the secret things IBM didn’t tell them or want them to know (mostly the former).

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.