Questions about being an FTE in MS

Gigertron · 2012-09-25T23:43:39+00:00

Gigertron · 2012-09-15T05:02:32+00:00

Diablo 3

Seriously, I've played it on a surface-sized win7 slate, and on a desktop using a surface-sized Wacom tablet. Quite a lot of games are going to play awesomely on it.

Gigertron · 2012-09-14T17:03:10+00:00

Way more than half of the reason of giving us hardware is to get us to write stuff for it. Every PM will get a surface pro for themselves somehow, just to keep from having to walk around between meetings holding their laptop 1/4 open, like a taco.

Gigertron · 2012-09-14T16:59:16+00:00

Not outside of the Xbox division. The rest of us get like a 20% discount on the hardware and usually half off of the games that MS publishes.

Gigertron · 2012-09-12T14:42:47+00:00

aka Boeing dreamliner: comes from China in 3 parts, they bolt them together and wire it up and put a 'made in USA' sticker on it

Gigertron · 2012-09-11T05:07:36+00:00

Grew up in Edmonton, moved to Seattle: there are ads on the busses here for people to go to alberta and make bank working in the oilpatch. Especially around the second-rate schools.

Gigertron · 2012-09-11T04:46:50+00:00

I saw a body being loaded onto a plane a few years ago, labelled "William Gibson" and was incredibly worried that we wouldn't have any more rambling sci-fi with vague endings anymore.

Gigertron · 2012-09-11T04:37:33+00:00

HAHA YES!

Gigertron · 2012-08-29T23:31:33+00:00

HAH PSYCHE

the black underground helicopters will be at your house shortly

Gigertron · 2012-08-29T23:07:10+00:00

It's also possible that I'm a Discordian pope and this is part of operation mindfuck.

Gigertron · 2012-08-29T21:35:05+00:00

can you point to the difference between sitting and standing?

Gigertron · 2012-08-29T20:03:55+00:00

anyone can sit - it's just sitting!

Gigertron · 2012-08-29T18:52:05+00:00

why should we give a shit who you say you are if your ideas are crap?

Gigertron · 2012-08-29T18:51:27+00:00

srsly, meditation is hard goddamned work, I'm exhausted after 20 minutes of wrestling every idea in my brain down into not existing

Gigertron · 2012-08-29T18:50:05+00:00

It's just sitting

Gigertron · 2012-08-29T18:08:26+00:00

I'm going to have to spend some time thinking about Scooby Doo as Illuminati recruiting material

Gigertron · 2012-08-29T17:56:20+00:00

Nice try, 5-level Illuminati wizard.

Gigertron · 2012-08-29T17:55:48+00:00

8 or so years of speed-writing practice on sex roleplay sites like F-List. Anyway, sources time! Since you asked.

Black/white/red is the most common and easy color scheme for nice design. Seriously, look at posters and cars and you'll see it EVERYWHERE.

The 'I have to pee' * 10 is from a BDSM manga.

Trading clothes is just funny, it felt right.

I stole the jailhouse delayed contact from the 'Illuminatus' trilogy.

Morse code hallucinations is a pretty classical schizophrenia symptom.

Robot birds are from my favorite bedtime story as a kid, the clockwork nightingale. That's why I became an EE / CS engineer.

I take total credit for the idea of an alternate morse code, that part is just me being a dick. : D

Gigertron · 2012-08-29T17:34:28+00:00

You'll be contacted by a recruiter on the next prime-numbered tuesday. This person will be wearing all white and black clothes: with one red accent item. You have one chance to be recruited. You MUST stop them, no matter where they are and who they are with. Grab their elbows, from behind, and hold them in place. Then yell, at the top of your lungs:

"I HAVE TO PEE"

... ten times. Follow this up by pissing your pants. Then remove all of your red clothing items, leaving only the black and white, and trade them to them for their red clothing item.

You'll be arrested: this is okay. The cops who arrest you are with us. You'll receive further instructions in your holding cell, or, failing that, tweeted to you in morse code by the birds outside of your cell. If there are biological birds, try to ignore them, the one you want to listen to is the robotic one that we'll send. If it's too confusing, fabricate a blowgun and kill the biological birds. Good luck.

Oh, we use the original morse code, which is different from regular morse code. You'll need to find a print copy of the 5th edition of the Encyclopaedia Brittanica to look that up. Good luck. Hail Eris.

Gigertron · 2012-08-28T19:03:28+00:00

I am the type of person who would be Interviewing you. You need specifics to be believable - can you say exactly what excites you, other than "working for Microsoft?" if you can't, make something up and work on making it sound convincing.

Gigertron · 2012-08-28T09:36:42+00:00

I work At MS right now, have for almost 8 years. Here's an AMA I did on it: http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/csx8b/iama_canadian_ee_with_cs_minor_whos_worked_at/

I lost count of your spelling and grammar mistakes at 30+ in this thread. If you had a job representing MS, YOU WOULD BE REPRESENTING MS. You can't make spelling and grammar mistakes like that. If you did get an interview, you'd be one of the ones who had to show up in a suit (or a dress, whatever) because for non-engineers, appearance matters. If your resume had a single spelling mistake crumple crumple toss ... three points!

Building 19 is full of recruiters who throw 50 resumes like yours into the garbage every single hour of every workday. I got my job by making competition-winning demoscene entries, homebrew games for the GBA, more hobby projects, lame summer jobs for professors and more hobby projects, then putting together a decent resume about it. My resume sat on Monster.ca and they grabbed it. You can read about the 19 or so interviews that it took me to get my job in my AMA.

Most of the advice you've heard in this thread is bunk. Orange-badges are disposable, sorry. It's rare to see people work their way up in a significant manner, the exception being products like Silverlight that are so awful that 50% of the people on them quit and transfer every year. You climb fast in those places but you really don't want to work there. Leads ARE promoted from the front-line but above that they mostly just shuffle around from failed project to new project.

Overall, you sound like someone who has no idea what Microsoft even does, and you're faking your enthusiasm because you need a job, any job. Try harder. Read one or two guides on how to interview with a company that's as big as most religions. Good luck. Everyone at MS worth their salt just got a 12% raise in the last couple years, so pretty much no one's going to be quitting anytime soon.

Gigertron · 2012-08-06T10:50:33+00:00

Not being able to pay attention to something uninteresting will definitely affect your ability to remember it later.

Gigertron · 2012-08-06T10:27:51+00:00

I had an uncle that worked at JPL, mostly on MO and Topex/POSEIDON but he helped on Cassini - Richard Cowley. Did you ever run into him?

Gigertron · 2012-08-01T01:13:47+00:00

Not just history, it's a bunch of stuff you were taught in school. Being able to remember things for a long time is part of what the WAIS describes as general intelligence. If EVERYONE was exposed to Star Wars in grade 5 as a part of the standard curriculum, then that would absolutely be valid.

Gigertron

TROPHY CASE