Geek in question: Omar Shahine
Job title: Lead Program Manager in Hotmail, based in Microsoft’s Silicon Valley Campus (SVC)
How is working for Microsoft in Silicon Valley different from working in Redmond?
Working for Microsoft down here humbles you a bit. Being in the Valley gives you a different perception of Microsoft’s role in the industry … Google’s less than a mile over that way. Yahoo’s a mile over there. We all have friends and spouses who work both places. Proximity gives you a different perspective than what you have in Redmond, where you’re surrounded tens of thousands of Microsoft employees.
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Amir: former Technical Director of Farts & Explosions for South Park; current UX designer for MSN.
The geek in question: Amir Bahadori
The job title: UX Designer II
What are you working on right now?
My team works with Fortune 500 companies to create entertainment experiences that we promote on the MSN homepage. We just did a website for LeBron James from the Cleveland Cavaliers — it was this 3D book that opened up and had articles and content about his life.
Essentially every project is its own universe. We take from our services and create an experience that people can come in and play with and spend some time with the brand, so there’s a bit of brand lift.
Ha! You said “brand lift.”
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Jeff Lin, guitarist for Seattle band Harvey Danger, talks about Virtual Earth 3D, work/life balance, and finding your destiny.
Jeff Lin doesn't want a corporate mother
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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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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A Microsoft tester spills his guts about testing tools for devs, chugging the kool-aid, and dancing zombies
The geek in question
Justin Wilcox
The job title
Test Lead, MSMQ
MSMQ, huh? Nice Microsoft acronym. Break it down for me.
MSMQ stands for Microsoft Message Queuing, which ships as part of Windows. We’re a messaging platform that developers use if you’ve got an application on Computer A that wants to send information to Computer B, you use us to guarantee that information gets there, even if there’s a failure (e.g. machines burst into flames, someone trips over the Ethernet cable, asteroids, etc.) after you sent the information.
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