I went to Seattle.
Really, it was a few weeks ago now (three), but I did go. The idea was to interview with Microsoft. I interviewed with both the Authoring Services (specifically OneNote) and the SharePoint team.
OneNote is a journaling/digital notebook tool that seems almost necessarily intended for tablets and laptops. It was pretty neat, and definitely my favourite of the teams I saw.
SharePoint was pretty blah, it is corporate document management software, which to me, is super boring.
The experience was pretty interesting though, the campus was not as nice as expected. It was leafy and green, but the buildings were pretty ugly and were all about the same. It was large, but it was so spread out that it wasn’t overwhelming. It also didn’t have much of a sense of unity, people weren’t walking around and talking outside (actually no one was outside) and it wasn’t even raining.
They shuttled all their interviewies around one at a time in hybrid cars. I played a fun game with the different drivers of these cars called the “How Many Buildings Are On Campus?” game. It seems to be a tough question. Some say forty, many said around sixty, one said eighty. The building numbers went up to around one-hundred twenty, but it is possible they skip around.
It was really sad to me to see that they had no concept of the overall company. I am used to an environment where knowledge like that is discouraged, and it was sad to see that at a company where it probably isn’t actively fought against, people still don’t care. The employees also had an awful hard time explaining to me the corporate structure above their own team, giving me a full list of how many groups there are (or even a nearly complete partial list).
Overall though, I was impressed, everyone was friendlier and more open that I expected, they also do a good job maintaining a smaller group feel which I think is nice. However, they decided they didn’t want me, which was too bad, because I wanted them to want me so I could turn them down. But I suppose the end result is the same, I am not working for Microsoft.
The rest of the trip was quite nice, exploring both Bellevue (a ritzy suburb of Seattle, close to Redmond) and also downtown Seattle. Specifically I had a great time at the Seattle Public Library (picture above), one of the best libraries ever, designed by Rem Koolhaas which opened just two years ago. That was great.
We went out to dinner Tuesday night (the day after my interview), in Bellevue, at the P.F. Chang’s there. While we were waiting for our food to arrive, a cute young blond waitress came over and told us “Guess what guys, Bill Gates just called, and he said he is coming in tonight – in a few hours – and you two are sitting at his table!!” That was pretty exciting, and it was a good table. Corner window booth, out of the way, nice view. That was exciting. We talked about staying and taking a really long time to see if they would kick us out, because King Bill was arriving.
We never got to find out because just about ten minutes later, CYB waitress came back over and said “Sorry guys, I was wrong … he is already here, right over there.” And so we look, and there he was, four booths away from us, eating dinner with Melinda. We were told later by the Starbucks staff that are in the same mini-indoor mall as P.F. Chang’s that he eats their frequently, once or twice a month, they see him all the time. I guess the richest man in the world likes his Americanized Chinese Food.
