Dare is just your average program manager, popular Microsoft blogger, son-of-the-former-Nigerian-president. When he recently bailed on his very popular blog, I had to follow up with him on the details.
Dare Obasanjo and his officemates
We’ll start with the easy question: how long have you been here and what are you working on right now?
I’ve been with Microsoft for six years, and right now I’m a PM on the contacts platform. Recently I worked on the initial platform for events.live.com, and then I worked on the What’s New page on Spaces, which shows you what your friends have been doing on Spaces.
When I interviewed Mini-Microsoft a couple months ago, I asked him about his favorite MSFT bloggers, and he mentioned you. And then two weeks later, you quit blogging! What’s up with that?
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Social tools show job applicants what it’s really like to work at Microsoft.
By Steve Birge
Microsoft's social-oriented recruiting initiatives include the Facebook page Workin' it @ MSFT.
Anybody who’s looked for a new job knows that the job posting rarely gives a real sense of what it would be like to work at the new place. It’s particularly challenging if the position is new or rare.That’s exactly the problem staffing consultant Terry Jordan was having when he filled an escalation engineer position recently. Applications were few, and people he did hear from were confused about what an escalation engineer does. At a global staffing conference, he met colleagues who suggested adding a
podcast of an escalation engineer talking about what the job entails.
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Last week I attended BlogHer Business in New York City, and appeared on a panel alongside two other Microsoft bloggers, Ani Babaian and Sara Ford. Sara let me pepper her with questions for a couple minutes about the work she’s doing with CodePlex, Microsoft’s open source project hosting site.
Sara Ford in NYC
The Geek in question: Sara Ford
The job title: Program Manager,
CodePlex.com
Obviously, open source + Microsoft = touchy subject with a lot of history. I’m curious how you approach that. Do you put on your special
kid gloves before work every day?
We want to create a site that provides a great user experience for open source development on the Microsoft platform. We want people to be able to collaborate in an online world by giving them project management tools and a source code repository. And, they can track bugs, features, and have discussion boards — all the things that you need for an open, collaborative environment.
When I’m engaging with the open source community, I say, “Hey, I was hired at Microsoft straight out of college — I’ve only seen how proprietary software is built, so I’m curious about how open source projects work. Come and show me how it works.”
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Software Design Engineer Jeffrey Kafer parlayed an interest in acting into a part-time career doing voice-overs. His fledgling efforts have already earned him honors.
By Fred Albert
Jeffrey Kafer says that voice-over work gives him a creative outlet without taking him away from his family or his job as an SDET. It’s even earned him an award.
April 14, 2008
Jeffrey Kafer spends a lot of his time in the closet. And if he has his way, he won’t be coming out any time soon.
The closet in question is in Kafer’s Monroe, Washington, home. A scant four feet square, it doubles as a recording studio, where the 35-year-old software design engineer in test pursues his dream of becoming a voice-over artist. Poised at a microphone surrounded by sound-deadening sweaters and blankets, he records lines from commercials, films, software, and books, hoping to become the next James Earl Jones or—at the very least—Don Pardo. “I’ve been known to be in my closet for two or three hours every night,” Kafer laughed.
Kafer’s interest in voice-over work was a natural outgrowth of his involvement in theater. He started acting in his teens and participated in community theater and college improv groups for the next 20 years. But as he got older, other responsibilities took precedence. “I got married and had two kids and just couldn’t devote three or four nights a week to rehearsals,” Kafer explained.
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New “vertical campus” in Boston area gives Microsoft a presence in a bustling tech community. Recruit-rich MIT and Harvard are nearby.
By Steve Birge
Microsoft’s new vertical campus in Cambridge, Massachusetts, occupies this building very close to Harvard, MIT, and downtown Boston.
Microsoft is working to dispel the perception by many in the United States that it is a Seattle company.
It has development offices in Silicon Valley, North Dakota, North Carolina, and sales offices elsewhere in the U.S. Its extensive global presence includes development centers in India, Ireland, Israel, and China.
Now, in hopes of stepping even farther away from its Seattle-centric image, Microsoft is substantially expanding its presence in the Boston area. It opened offices there last fall and now is aggressively recruiting for a “vertical campus” in Cambridge, an office that will have many groups on separate floors in one building, as opposed to Redmond’s “horizontal” campus model. The new campus is located across the Charles River from downtown Boston, in the heart of the East Coast’s hottest technology center and down the road from technology powerhouses MIT and Harvard.
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Fiddler in the woods
The geek in question: Alex MacLeod
The job: Senior Test Manager,
Exchange
Do you feel like the Exchange team gets no love? Like people see it as less sexy than, say, Xbox?
Totally. When people apply at Microsoft, they get this boilerplate form where they check their interest in different groups. And the only two check boxes I’ve ever seen marked are Games or Mobile Devices. And occasionally someone who thinks they’re a hardcore computer candidate will check OS, but no one ever chooses the Enterprise applications like Exchange. No one knows what it means and it doesn’t sound cool.
But see, I work on a product that for millions of people and millions of businesses across the globe, isn’t a “nice to have” feature. It’s a complete “must have.” There’s not a company in the world that doesn’t view their ability to communicate effectively with each other through email as total mission critical. And when it doesn’t work whole economies suffer. Continue reading →
Microsoft’s Baudboys head to San Francisco this week to compete for national a cappella singing title.
By Fred Albert
April 29, 2008
The Baudboys have been performing around Microsoft since the early 1990s. The current group includes (back row) Graham Sheldon, Ric Lewis, Owen Braun, Elliot Lewis, Dave McEwen and (front row) Jon Schwartz, Mark Adolph, Paul Eng.
It has all the makings of a Hollywood hit: Eight nerds band together to form a singing group. On the eve of the big competition, one of the members breaks his back, but the show goes on, and in spite of seemingly insurmountable odds, the geeks beat out the pros to nab the grand prize. Microsoft’s own Baudboys, an eight-man a cappella singing group, took top honors March 8 at the Pacific Northwest Harmony Sweepstakes, besting more experienced groups for the title of top a cappella group in the region, despite the fact that first tenor Ric Lewis had to spend much of the concert confined to a chair due to a degenerate disc.
“The fact that we won Northwest Harmony Sweeps was the upset of the year, because we were going up against six other professional groups,” marveled Dave McEwen, Baudboys president and a content project manager for Developer and Platform Evangelism. “When they finally announced who won, we were all in shock.”
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