New Job

So the most common question I get from my co-workers and friends when I tell them I have quit Sun Microsystems and am moving to Seattle to take a job with Microsoft, is "what were you thinking?" Besides that everyone wants to know what I will be doing in my new job, so I thought I'd address that here once and for all. First, I am not 100% clear on the product I will be working on as it is a relatively new product that is still being defined to some extent. But I have accepted a job as a Sr. Technical Program Manager in the Connected Systems Group, which, as I understand it, is a part of the Server and Tools division at Microsoft.

The program manager position [link1][link2] at Microsoft is one of three technical positions (SDE and SDET are the other two). I will be responsible for the vision, architecture, design, requirements, customer interaction, and evangelism of the product that we are building out. It involves coordinating across many teams at Microsoft, working with customers to get feedback and push the product, and working on developing the detailed technical direction and driving the implementation of the products. This type of position was really appealing to me as it is similar to what I have been doing at Sun Microsystems as a Product Architect, but it gives me a lot more responsibility and a lot more latitude in how I do my work. In addition I get to work much more closely with customers, something that I was "sheltered" from at Sun. I still get to remain as an individual contributor and still get to be very hands on with the technical details of things, but won't be writing a lot of code for the product, although I will get to prototype stuff. I get to work with the management team, the engineering teams, the test teams, the architects, and the project managers. I get to work with teams outside of my product group and outside of the division, both engineering groups and non-engineering groups.

While it seems pretty clear what the PM role is, I have less of an idea what the product we are actually developing is.... From what I gathered during my interviews, the product that I will be responsible for is aiming to provide a framework that sits on top of the different infrastructure products that Microsoft has (BizTalk, WWF, WCF, etc.). A large part of this framework allows developers to easily create applications on top of these products using a declarative language similar to XUL from Mozilla. It sounds pretty interesting. The immediate goal of the product is to release internally to the other product groups within Microsoft. Many of the applications that the infrastrucutre products will provide to their users would likely be built with this, there are some things within the Office suite that would utilize this framework, and possibly even some things in the operating systems that would use it as well. Once the framework has been integrated into internal products and we've gotten it really stable and strong, we will be releasing it as a public api, possibly as part of the .Net framework. This is where some of the external customer interaction of the position comes in. So that is about all I know about it. I do know that it sounds really interesting though and has a lot of potential. The initial product vision is something that came out of Microsoft Research and a couple of the lead engineers on the project moved into this group from the Research group to continue working on this product.

So there it is, what I know about what I will be doing at Microsoft.