First day at Microsoft
Holy shit. Its been one looong day!
The neighbours woke me up at 6am to celebrate Allan's birthday. Now all of you who know me fully understand the consequences of waking up Mike before his time (ie. 11am). I was grumpy, tired, and looked like some undead character out of Night of the Living Dead.
So as tradition dictates, you wake up at 6 with your mates and invade the kitchen. You then proceed to eat tasty bagels and pancakes with butter and jam and cheese and anything else you can scrape off the back of your fridge. You do this repeatedly for about 2 hours whilst drinking loads of beer and shot after shot of Gammel Dansk, a Danish spirit which tastes somewhat like a digestive liqueur mixed with horsepiss. Its an aquired taste, and by 8am i've acquired it.
I got washed and changed and met the IAESTE guy outside, still abit drowsy, and we took bus and train and bus to Microsoft's grand palace in Vedbaek. This is a quiet seaside village north of Copenhagen, and the Microsoft area takes up a good part of it.
I met Andries Roux, Test Manager, who directed me to my place and told me what i'll be doing. Nice guy to have as a boss, and he as well as all the other employees look like very experienced and talented people. Now i'm really feeling out of place in a suit, because in Denmark you just wear casual clothes to work. I met the team i'm with, who's names i can't pronounce anyway so i wont bother mentioning them. Apparently there's also another 10 IAESTE trainees working at MS.DK.
[Geek Rant -- just skip this if you don't have thick glasses, crusty underwear, pimples, and have never met members of the opposite sex]
Apparently i'm in the MBF Devtools Entity Mapping team. Let me explain. MBF is MS's new Business Framework, a plugin which will be part and parcel of the new Whidbey release and will come into its full culmination in VS for Longhorn. This framework is an amazing set of tools, all very graphical, for creating business applications rapidly and securely, by using drag-and-drop entities, relations, properties, and other elements with automatic code generation and automatic mapping to tables. Its going to be an awesome tool guys, mark my words! My job is apparently to test some shit here n there and to perform daily test runs, apart from some other stuff my test lead Jan Jakobssen will be giving me.
Microsoft is BIG. There's a giant corporate intranet with literally thousands of pages connecting all the teams and products together, and they've got tons of internal software systems working in unison to help development and the company move forward in general. So much to learn, so much to do, and all so confusing on your first day! My desk also has a huge Fujitsu TFT and a fast computer, as well as a nice thick book about the framework which i suppose i have to learn inside out within the week. Sweet!
On a lighter note, i also found out i've got BUFFET LUNCH and breakfast, plus free drinks and sweets all day long, cake on thursdays, and leftovers in the evenings. If you're lucky, you'll get wine and champagne on fridays: leftovers after the conferences they hold there (yay). So yeah, i'm in heaven. MS really knows how to create a perfect working environment for its 800 employees in Copenhagen. Its not about giving out freebies, its about making sure everyone is happy. A happy employee is a productive employee. A happy employee is a faithful employee.
One thing which impressed me is the amazing sense of belonging and will to work which these guys have. Its like everyone is rowing the same boat, happily working overtime to reach deadlines, congratulating teammates on achieved milestones, and really working intensely towards the final deadline and release of the product. Its great to work with people who are there to work because they love it, you can really see it on their faces. This is where i belong, not in some shit-hole with minimum wage where everyone does his best to leave earlier and steal stuff from the office, outputting the minimum possible quality work and trying to sound clever and bombastic.
Its going to be great! I love this place already and don't want to go back to any other shitty job.
The neighbours woke me up at 6am to celebrate Allan's birthday. Now all of you who know me fully understand the consequences of waking up Mike before his time (ie. 11am). I was grumpy, tired, and looked like some undead character out of Night of the Living Dead.
So as tradition dictates, you wake up at 6 with your mates and invade the kitchen. You then proceed to eat tasty bagels and pancakes with butter and jam and cheese and anything else you can scrape off the back of your fridge. You do this repeatedly for about 2 hours whilst drinking loads of beer and shot after shot of Gammel Dansk, a Danish spirit which tastes somewhat like a digestive liqueur mixed with horsepiss. Its an aquired taste, and by 8am i've acquired it.
I got washed and changed and met the IAESTE guy outside, still abit drowsy, and we took bus and train and bus to Microsoft's grand palace in Vedbaek. This is a quiet seaside village north of Copenhagen, and the Microsoft area takes up a good part of it.
I met Andries Roux, Test Manager, who directed me to my place and told me what i'll be doing. Nice guy to have as a boss, and he as well as all the other employees look like very experienced and talented people. Now i'm really feeling out of place in a suit, because in Denmark you just wear casual clothes to work. I met the team i'm with, who's names i can't pronounce anyway so i wont bother mentioning them. Apparently there's also another 10 IAESTE trainees working at MS.DK.
[Geek Rant -- just skip this if you don't have thick glasses, crusty underwear, pimples, and have never met members of the opposite sex]
Apparently i'm in the MBF Devtools Entity Mapping team. Let me explain. MBF is MS's new Business Framework, a plugin which will be part and parcel of the new Whidbey release and will come into its full culmination in VS for Longhorn. This framework is an amazing set of tools, all very graphical, for creating business applications rapidly and securely, by using drag-and-drop entities, relations, properties, and other elements with automatic code generation and automatic mapping to tables. Its going to be an awesome tool guys, mark my words! My job is apparently to test some shit here n there and to perform daily test runs, apart from some other stuff my test lead Jan Jakobssen will be giving me.
Microsoft is BIG. There's a giant corporate intranet with literally thousands of pages connecting all the teams and products together, and they've got tons of internal software systems working in unison to help development and the company move forward in general. So much to learn, so much to do, and all so confusing on your first day! My desk also has a huge Fujitsu TFT and a fast computer, as well as a nice thick book about the framework which i suppose i have to learn inside out within the week. Sweet!
On a lighter note, i also found out i've got BUFFET LUNCH and breakfast, plus free drinks and sweets all day long, cake on thursdays, and leftovers in the evenings. If you're lucky, you'll get wine and champagne on fridays: leftovers after the conferences they hold there (yay). So yeah, i'm in heaven. MS really knows how to create a perfect working environment for its 800 employees in Copenhagen. Its not about giving out freebies, its about making sure everyone is happy. A happy employee is a productive employee. A happy employee is a faithful employee.
One thing which impressed me is the amazing sense of belonging and will to work which these guys have. Its like everyone is rowing the same boat, happily working overtime to reach deadlines, congratulating teammates on achieved milestones, and really working intensely towards the final deadline and release of the product. Its great to work with people who are there to work because they love it, you can really see it on their faces. This is where i belong, not in some shit-hole with minimum wage where everyone does his best to leave earlier and steal stuff from the office, outputting the minimum possible quality work and trying to sound clever and bombastic.
Its going to be great! I love this place already and don't want to go back to any other shitty job.
posted by [mike.bc] at 11:45 pm
<< Home