Dan Grossman

I finally had the last of this round of interviews — my first attempt to find a coop job for April through September to finish the work experience requirement of my degree at Drexel. I met with two really nice people from Microsoft in the morning. First, a recruiter for the IT department that just tried to get to know my personality, where my passions lie and why I want to work at Microsoft. She had this great personality and was really easy to talk with so the whole thing flowed very smoothly.

Then I met with someone that did more technical work for MSIT who went through my experience more in depth. He was great too, I got to talk a lot about myself which doesn’t always happen with some interviewers, but it stayed conversational. We spent some time talking about Vista and the bugs in the RCs and even into Microsoft Hardware — he promised to let me know if he can find out why nobody has the keyboard I’ve been drooling over since September in stock even though the ship date for the 7000 series was supposed to be 1/8.

A couple hours later I met up with some manager types from DuPont where I worked last year and talked about coming back if I didn’t get an offer from Microsoft. It’s always good to have a backup plan. The two Microsoft interviews went well but I don’t honestly expect an offer — I have no recent work experience developing in the Visual Studio environment, with .NET or anything that’s come about in the last 4 years or so since moving off to C++, Java and PHP.

My direct manager, who offered me his job before I left, already left the company for another position, but he made sure everyone else knew I was the best programmer on the team when I was there, so they definitely want to re-hire me.

The Microsoft group that flew in got an e-mail out to everyone that interviewed with them through Drexel’s career development center to let us know they were having an info session type gathering in the evening which I just got back from. It was real casual and they and a student from Drexel that worked there last year (and is going back to join the Xbox XA team) talked about life at Microsoft and in Seattle.

About half an hour into it they pulled out a brand new Xbox 360 with a bunch of games and had everyone throw their names in a hat and raffled it off. I won! I haven’t owned a game console since the Nintendo 64, which my parents had paid for so many years ago. I’ve never spent my own money on one, but now I get to try out everything I saw when Bill Gates gave the CES keynote address last week — Xbox Live, Xbox TV, Vista Ultimate’s media center integration with Xbox Live, using the Xbox 360 controller to navigate MS Live Virtual Earth. I’ll have a lot of fun with this.

A great day in the end. I’ve got a lot of work to catch up on so I’ll stop writing here, but I also got to meet Richard Stallman in person, the man behind GNU and the free software movement. He gave an hour and a half talk at Drexel about software patents that I managed to get to between interviews and classes. Very interesting guy.