I wrote a bit of a career retrospective just a few months before I joined the Communicator team at Microsoft (the series is captured in these posts: (part 1 is here, part 2 is here, part 3 is here, part 4 is here, and part 5 is here).
June 6, 1995 – exactly 15 years ago today – was my very first day at Microsoft. No need to retrospect again, but wow – what a variety of experiences I’ve had. I never thought I’d work at Microsoft this long, but I have no regrets.
Here are some non-traditional stats I thought I’d share.
- Number of offices:15
- Number of buildings I’ve worked in: 7 (Buildings 4, 10, 27, 118, 21, “Westpark”, and 30)
- Most number of offices in one building: 5 (building 27)
- Number of managers: 12 (including one manager for nearly 6 years)
- Note: two of those managers lasted only a week
- Number of projects I’ve worked on that were cancelled by BillG: 1 (in 1999 or so, I was part of a small virtual team working on some digitial tv stuff)
- Number of programming and script languages I’ve learned 9 (in mostly chronological order: Visual Test, C, C++, Perl, VBScript, x86 Assembly, C#, Python (I’ve used all of these for testing except Python)
- Number of shipping products I’ve worked on: 11 (not bad, considering that I spent 5 years in EE not working on products)
Update:
- Number of employees at MS when I started: ~7500 (compared with ~90k today)
- Number of those 7500 still at MS: ~4500
- Number of those 4500 with the same start date as mine: 30
There’s probably more, but that’s all that comes to the top of my mind. Not bad for only 15 years.