The geek in question: Jeff Sandquist

The job title: Senior Director, Platform Evangelism

How long have you been with the company?
I think it’s been about 12 years. I get a plaque every once and a while to remind me. I started as a contractor answering phones for Product Support Services.

So, if you’ve been here that long, you’ve gotten to witness Microsoft’s shift toward transparency — including your own “peer to peer over a beer” work with Channel 9. What are the limits of that transparency? How does it feel knowing management reads your blog?

When I first started here, I was terrified of the higher ups. They were almost like Santa Claus — these mythical figures running these billion dollar businesses. I used to be so scared of Sanjay that I would actually go down a different hallway rather than talk to him.

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The geek in question: Jonathan Biderman
The job title: Program Manager, Infopath

My, you’re looking snappy today. What’s up? Do you have a job interview or something?
Thanks! But why does anyone need a reason to dress up, down or sideways? Since Microsoft doesn’t have a dress code I could just as readily choose to wear holey jeans and sandals as I could a tuxedo (…one of these days…)

Interviewing may be a typically assumed reason for dressing up at Microsoft, but I just wanted to start wearing the nice clothes that otherwise would be gathering dust in my closet. I decided that if I wear my numerous ties, I won’t actually have too many. That, and it certainly amuses my team.

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Jeff Lin, guitarist for Seattle band Harvey Danger, talks about Virtual Earth 3D, work/life balance, and finding your destiny.

Geek in question: Jeff Lin
Job title: Program Manager, Virtual Earth 3D

What are you working on right now?
Virtual Earth 3D is all about realistic representation of the world. We’ve got a couple hundred cities with photo-realistic imagery and 3D geometry. You can add photos, make movies, do tours. It’s actually super cool. I think it’s one of the coolest things that Microsoft is doing.

Do you have to say that because you work on it?
Naw. I feel pretty lucky that I got this position. I just started in this group five months ago. I’d been over at MSN since 2005, and when I applied for this job, I was like, there’s no way. I think I just lucked out.
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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 →

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.
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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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.

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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Talking about transparency, transgender health care coverage, and ushering out the era of table-pounding Microsoft managers with General Manager Megan Wallent, formerly known as Michael Wallent.

What are you working on right now?
Right now I’m the general manager of an unnamed group.

…Ha! Pure Microsoft!
My group is the conglomeration of a bunch of different things including Power Shell, Server Management UI, the over-all Server UI models, plus a bunch of other infrastructure pieces, plus Softgrid. So, we don’t really have an all-up name for it, but the pseudo-name is WinMan.

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I first met Zune developer Hoop Somuah last summer, after a colleague on the Zune team suggested that he might make a good profile for the ViewMyWorld website. We covered all sorts of topics in his profile, including the ways that the small team felt like a start-up, and the ruffled feathered from a coding retreat that some regarded as a coup. More than six months (and a Zune release) later, I thought I’d catch up with Hoop again to see how things were going.

Hey, Hoop. So, what’s changed since we spoke last summer?
Last year was all about building the base for the Zune service. This year, we’re working on building cool stuff on top of that infrastructure. Last year we were much more hard pressed for schedule, trying to make the release date for Zune 2.0.

Summer and early fall of 2007 I worked harder than I have ever worked in my life — harder than college, even harder than when I had two jobs simultaneously.
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Microspotting isn’t about me, but there have been a few stories about your humble editor that have popped up in the news over the last month or so. I figured I’d share them as I’m recovering from my week at SXSW Interactive.

New Microspotting profiles will be coming next week!
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Perhaps you’re familiar with Mini-Microsoft, the anonymous Deep Throat Microsoft blogger who’s been lovingly griping online about the company online since 2004.

Mini is somewhat infamous (having been interviewed by Business Week and The Seattle Times) and has managed to maintain his anonymity despite all the attention.

I recently had the chance to pester Mini with some of my own questions, and took the opportunity to ask him about his sad experience with facebook, how he felt about Fake Steve Jobs, and his groupies.

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