Lessons from 22 Years at MS

By Jeff Stride

Overview

• My Background
• Journey - My Teams, Products & Roles
• Hardships - The experiences that helped teach & shape me
• Microsoft Successes - Why I might be worth listening to
• 22 Lessons (clustered into 6 groups)
• Things I learned at work and not in college

Mr. Stride’s Background

• Home town: San Jose. Cupertino High School
• Community College
• --> Brown University --> San Jose State University --> UC Santa Barbara
• Internship at NASA
• Programming was always a hobby
• Hired at Microsoft in ‘95: practice interviewing gone “too right”

Microsoft Journey

SDET: Microsoft Bob (9 months)

PM: MSNBC News Viewer Offline 2.0 (6 months)

SDE: MS Works, Small Biz, MS Money (~2.5 years)

SDE Lead/Manager: MS Money (~9 years)

SDE Lead <-> Engineering Manager: MSN (CSL, HomePage, Entertainment) (~7 years)

SDE Lead: Microsoft Windows (Microsoft.com) (~2 years)

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Hardships

• Re-Orgs: moving from client to web, endless new technologies, countless new managers
• Middleman: between two opposing engineering teams on CSL Framework. Repeated again with OneUI: Engineering vs Design
• Home Page Firehose: diverse international demands, fast release cadence, intense availability demands, time zones
• Political: new VP, changing culture, stealing top developers, grabbing shiney products, deflecting blame
• Review Models: curve model, labeling as 1-5, transparency of numbers and rankings, promote or let-go
• Live Site: DRI duties at all hours, intense scrutiny & review
• Deadlines & long hours: not so much (depending on personal life)

My Successes

Products Delivered

• MS Money: A “small company” that touched millions
• MSN Diversity: Worked on virtual every team & technology
• Billions Served: MSN Home page, Microsoft.com
• Rebuilt ENT on new MSN & Bing architecture

Skills Achieved

• Languages & Architecture (FE, SQL/Big Data, Bing, Azure)
• Management Soft Skills: communication, Project Management, conflict, team Sizes ranged from 5 to 80 (including remote vendors)
• Political Exposure & Understanding (not mastery)

Benefits & Salary:

• Promoted to Level 66: Principal Engineering Manager
• Top 5% of employees in salary and tenure seniority

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Three Things Matter

1. Pursue 3 things every day
• Fun
• Learning
• Satisfy your Customer/Manager
2. Keys to success
• Set Expectations
• Cater to your customer
• It's all about the people

Fun (Work-Life Balance)

3. It's not about waiting for the storm to end: it's about learning to dance in the rain.
4. Separate from work, every day.
5. Take care of yourself, both physically and mentally. Exercise!
6. If you're not having fun, change it, or yourself, to make it fun. You need to be interested and have passion in your work.
7. There is never a good day to take vacation; every day is equally as good to take a vacation.
8. Make friends at work.

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Learn

9. Always have a mentor.
10. You need to make yourself uncomfortable to grow in significant ways.
11. Find the positive in every experience.
12. Only you own your career. Invest in yourself… on your own time.
13. Behave like the person you aspire to be. Fake it 'til you make it.
14. Reflect often: priorities, efficiency, working smarter

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Satisfy your Customer/Manager

15. Your manager will make or break you. Find one that values you!
16. Don't rush your career advancement, but don't expect others to take care of it for you. 
17. You can change the requirements to improve the results. 

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Set Expectations (with others & yourself)

18. Those 1 or 2 (or 10) days you worked late or on the weekend, won't guarantee you a good review. But, never working overtime can earn you a bad review. Effort != Impact, but there is a correlation. 
19. If you're not overwhelmed, you're not busy enough: if you don't have too much to do, you need more work. (Too much work says the business is strong, and it forces you to prioritize.)
20. Push hard to have the role you want on the team you want.

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Never Forget

21. You work for Microsoft, you can change the world.
22. There is life after Microsoft.

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