Office Pro Plus 2010 Product Key blog positions-at

Now that Gretchen warmed you last evening with her ideas on STEs (and gave us a fancy new appear), it’s time to get to the nitty-gritty on the other positions we recruit for…






Looking at our career site today we have a whopping 2,198 open positions. Wow! It’s great that we’re hiring, but I can see why it’s hard to navigate the system. :-) Hopefully we can provide some information here that can help you think about the different roles we have.




My feeling is that roughly ½ of the open positions that we have today fall into what I would call the “core technical” category. These are largely individual contributor roles (no people management) and directly contribute to designing, developing, testing and shipping the product. Common titles that you will see at Microsoft are; Software Development Engineer, Software Development Engineer/Test, Software Test Engineer and Program Manager.




The links above will give you a better idea of the “technical career path” and is the official information on the roles at Microsoft. Make sure to refer to this information in conjunction with the stuff we tell you here.




I thought I would get started by talking about the Software Development Engineer (SDE) job. There is a lot of ground to cover here and please note that we speak in generalities on this site. Gosh I feel like a broken record :-P




The position:


SDE is probably the most well known position at Microsoft. I like to think of this position as the “keeper of the code”. (Thanks Gretchen!) Essentially these people spend most of their time hold up in their offices coding features for specific products. Well at least that is my perception!




What you might do in a typical day:


Seriously,Office Pro Plus 2010 Product Key, you’ll be writing code in C/C++ and/or C# to develop next gen products from the ground up. And boy are there lots of opportunities to do this at Microsoft! As you know we develop a wide range of technologies from applications to operating systems to servers. So there is big chance to go deep or broad in your career path depending on the products you develop.




Okay, enough of the PR and back to the actual work that you’ll do. I’d like to describe the position in relation to the development cycle. This is a _HIGHLY_ generalized (did I just say general again?) version so don’t ding me too much…

Planning – SDEs spend most of their time in this phase working with their Program Manager and Test counterparts to determine what features to work on and prioritize those features. They may also spend time doing research and investigation on how they will actually implement the specification. If you are working on the next version of the product you are also figuring out what features you left behind final time that need to be included this go around.




Development – this is the heads down coding piece of the cycle. You take ideas and turn them into code.




Test/Stabilization – Working with the folks from test you spend a lot of time debugging and working on bug fixes to make sure we are shipping quality code.




Release – this is when we get to ship right? Kinda, but you also might be working on high priority fixes etc. And then you start planning again for the next release.




I asked someone how much time they would spend in each of these phases. Based on a standard 12 month ship cycle,Office 2010 Pro Plus Activation, they said you could spend about 20% of your time planning, 35% of your time developing, 35% in test and stabilization and the remainder on the release.




What we appear for in potential candidates:


The skill set varies here depending on the product you want to develop. The below list is the bare bones minimum that I look for and then will augment it with the group’s requirements. In general (holy smoke I did it again),Office 2010 Pro Activation cl��, you should have good demonstrable (yep – that is a real word) experienced in:
Ideally programming experience in Windows, Win32 APIs etc. (Not a must have though!) Developing software in C/C++ and potentially moving toward C# Algorithms and data structures Shipping products




Career path:


It is hard for me to really define a “typical” career path for a SDE at Microsoft. It really depends on what you want to do and where you want to go. That being said, I often see people take two directions. This first is to move into a people management role – here you will manage a team of developers, you may still code at this point, but your scope of influence for planning,Microsoft Office 2010 Home And Business Key, scheduling,Office 2010 X64 Key, personnel management and meetings also increases. You might also add lead or manager to your title. On this path you gain more business side skills that could lead you on your way to a Product Unit Manager or Group Development Manager type position; which could be a few years down the line depending on your skills. I tend to see far more people take this road though then the next.




The other track is to move into more of a “technical leadership” position. Here you’ll spend far more time coding - no people management required – but you will still broaden your scope of influence for planning, scheduling etc. You may again add lead to your title, but you also might move into an architect position driving the technical vision for a specific group or product team. In this role you’ll stay very technical, but be expected to work across teams adding both breadth and depth skills to your technical experience. So again – this could be a couple of years or more down the row for you depending on your skills.




I am lining up a SDE at Microsoft to talk a little more about his job - what his days are like, why he does what he does etc. Gretchen and I will also be following up with more fun information on the other positions in the next few days.




For now - Goldring out!


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