Moving from California to a… well… less warm island can make one long for sunnier climates, Mexican food and definitely makes one miss their friends. Thank goodness for cheap calls via VOIP, friends with blogs and the wonder that is Xbox live. Last weekend we had a great time playing a very long-distance game of Ghost Recon. Ah… technology… ain’t it grand?
While flying home to Dublin from Redmond I was doing a little blog reading (hooray for SAS and airborne broadband) when I came across an interesting post on Dare’s blog regarding the Microsoft policy of needing permission from your manager before you can interview or a different position within MS. It’s a policy that leads to a certain amount of discomfort for any employ who wants to change jobs. Going to your manager for permission is tough, but here’s a promise I’ve made to myself which helps me (and works if I’m at Microsoft or not):
I’ve promised myself I won’t ever leave my current role – I will always go to a new role.
Here’s the big issue for me: when I’m fed up with work, my boss, my hours or whatever, any job will look good to me. As soon as I’m in flight mode, trying to run away from my current position I am super-likely to be simply abandoning the frying pan. There are always times at work where I’ll be pissed at my boss, annoyed at my coworkers and/or think the product has no chance of succeeding. When I get to that point I always take a deep breath and try to figure out if a) it’s something I can correct and b) if it’s something I think will last. It sounds pretty silly advice, but don’t ever leave a job you hate.
So, what should someone do if they hate their job? In the ideal world one will have picked a cool group at a cool company working on a cool product. Chances are there’s something you like about your job, find it and focus on it. You also have to decide you’re not going to adopt a victim mentality (it’s your bosses fault… your coworkers stole the credit… it will ship if test would find the bugs). Don’t ever think that you can’t make your situation better because that will sink the ship fast. Figure out what is broken and what part of it you can fix. Once everything is sunshine and roses you can move on (sure, I’m an idiot… but I’m an optimist).
I am totally comfortable at any point in time going to my boss and saying “Hey, I came across this internal job listing and it totally sounds like something I’d really like to do. Things are going great here but I’d really like the opportunity to go do this cool thing. May I please?” I may actually be happy in my current role or I may not… but if I actually honor my promise to myself I’m actually highly likely to be in a role I enjoy before I leave for one I’m going to enjoy even more.
So, what does this have to do with the Internal hiring policies? Here’s the thing: I feel if my manager thinks I am a good employee and honestly excited about going to a new role they will be disappointed to see me go but genuinely interested in helping me succeed. If I get the job I wanted my manager will be happy because they know I’m going to an exciting opportunity. If I don’t get the job my manager will be happy because they don’t loose me.
Afterword
I’ve been at Microsoft for almost ten years and been a manager on and off for roughly half that time. I’ve applied for internal positions and moved groups. I’ve also applied for jobs and not been hired. I’ve had employees request permission and I’ve granted it every time. Microsoft has policies about when a transfer can be blocked or delayed and are very reasonable. Always if your manager blocks your move and you think it’s unreasonable you should talk to your HR rep as they can help you to work through it.
Way back in the day ICQ allowed people to put a little snippet of HTML anywhere they liked and it would show their presence. That was very cool. Yahoo can do it too. AOL offers it. Now Skype is doing it too. Why, for the sake of all that is geeky, can’t we (Microsoft) do this for messenger?
Wait, I know, I’ll use a buzz-word: it’s viral! (it’ll happen for sure now).
I started my first blog back in 2002 on Blogger but switched to using dasBlog in late 2003 when I was wanting more control of my site. I’ve wanted to migrate the content over from the old site for a long time but never could find a tool to do the heaving lifting… until today when I discovered Nick Schweitzer’s “Coding Monkey” site. Nick has clear instructions as well as a GUI tool to help switch from Blogger to dasBlog. The process was quick and painless and his instructions were straight-forward. If you’ve been looking to import your old Blogger content into dasBlog but weren’t sure how, check out Nick’s instructions.
It’s more for me than anyone else… but if you want to find my old posts, you can just click on the “Old Blog” topic on the right.
Das Keyboard, the ultimate geek keyboard… it’s totally blank so you better know your stuff, no poseurs allowed.
Larry Larsen has posted some very cool videos of him playing around at home with eye tracking hardware. He has some videos of him playing xbox games with eye position overlayed but I found the roller coaster video the most interesting by far (it vividly demonstrates how strongly we are drawn to look at people’s eyes).
There is a whole mess of entertaining podcasts out there and one can spend hours finding entertaining ones. I have a list of my top podcasts but there definitely is one that sits at the top of my list. But before I go on, I’ll give a brief explanation of what a podcast is.
A podcast is a lot like a radio show you can listen to whenever you choose. Technically it’s little more than a blog post with an audio file attached, but the combination of software and hardware out there has made it very easy to get into subscribing to a large number of progarams. A huge benefit of blogging software is it provides a simple mechanism to an author to publish their work and for readers, a simple mechanism to know when there is new work to be found (last time I talked about blog reading software or “RSS Readers” was 2004 , I think I’ll need to share my findings on that later). But I digress, for more details I point you to Wikipedia for a detailed description.
Back to my original point, my absolute favorite podcast. If you are a regular listener of NPR on the weekends you may have had the occasion to listen “Wait wait… don’t tell me!”. It’s a news quiz with a panel made up of a rotating cast of humorists, authors and comedians. Think of it as one part daily show, one part Ben Stein and four parts high-larious. The absolute best way to get a feeling for it is to listen to the show (which you can do with or without being a podcasting geek). Recently they put out a “best of” show which is a great way to get an introduction to the flavor. Just go to the show page for July 8th, 2006 and click the “listen to the whole show” link. One bit of advice: when it asks you what media player you want to use, don’t select Real Player, it’s evil (and I don’t say that just because Microsoft makes the other choice, I say it because I honestly think the Real Player is crap).
For those of you who use an RSS reader or a Podcast aggregator to download programs automatically, be sure to check out the rest of NPR’s podcasts, they have a lot of quality programming available.
Earlier this spring Leah and I sat down with a videographer to talk about Live.com I’m such a geek and I could go on for hours talking about the stuff we do… I give a ton of credit to the editor and interviewer to be able to get something useful out of my endlessly meandering, spastic attention-span geek talk. We talked for a long time. It was really a ton of fun and they did some cool stuff making a virtual office with a few little bits you can click on (yep, you can find a picture of me with my mommy).
Inside Live was shuttered but before it did I archived a copy of the site and video interview: Inside Live video interviews of Reeves Little and Leah Pearlman.
If you think people talking on their little bluetooth headsets look like lunatics just wait until this new headset from Motorola hits the streets. Motorola’s Lilliputian H5 will make LA look like it’s out of lithium.
Several weeks back Ina Fried from c|net came to campus and interviewed a bunch of people. Her piece is now up on c|net news.com. It’s a good read to give folks a little glimpse into the team.
Ina spent the majority of the day with people around campus and a lunch in a conference room with some of us “old folks” from Hotmail. I’m not that old… really, honest. I wasn’t even “acquired” with Hotmail. I just have shown a decided lack of vision and stuck with the team for the past six years. 🙂 Demonstrating the power of the sound-byte, I was only with her for the lunch part but ended up with my own side bar. As a result I’m now working on growing a mullet.
Hey Warhol. is this going to be deducted from my fifteen minutes?
News.com link is dead but exists in the internet archive. A copy of the main article (without sidebar) is up on Tech Republic: Hotmail’s new address.