19 Nov 2008 rufius   » (Journeyer)

WEX: Devices and Media - SDET

The title of this blog post is the official team I’ll be joining next May at Microsoft as an Intern (and hopefully fulltime after that). It turned out that after my interviews at the beginning of November, each team expressed interest in having me join their teams (I didn’t really think they all would).

The teams I’d chosen to interview with before I flew up were FNO (Find and Organize), CoreUX, and DNM (Devices & Media). Originally my interests in each group were roughly in the aforementioned order. That is I was most interested in working for FNO and least interested in DNM. As I spent more time learning about DNM and what they do, it became apparent that I’d learn more there than I would in any other group.

Each group was interesting in its own ways. FNO has a very young group of developers and is a very high energy group. They own the Explorer and Desktop interfaces with anything that has to do with file manipulation included in that. They also own the indexing service used for desktop search. Had I chosen to work with that group, I probably would have tried to get in on the indexing side of things. Its a lot of coding (what I like) and its at the core of my interest in that group.

CoreUX on the other hand owns the start/taskbar, the window framing, sidebar, and so on. Things that make Windows look like… well Windows. The team members I met with were all very encouraging and a group of really interesting individuals. Their manager, John Cable, was the guy I interviewed with during my first round interviews and was indispensible to me through the whole process in helping me make decisions about my time with Microsoft.

Finally, DNM manages the pipelines that serve up audio/video to the screen and speakers, interfacing with devices like the Zune, cellphones, bluetooth devices and things like the Roku (look it up, its sweet). They are a “foundation” team, meaning that a lot of other groups in WEX build on top of what they provide. For example, CoreUX is in control of Windows Media Player which has to use the media technologies supported/owned by DNM. This type of exposure to different technologies inside Microsoft as well as outside (like Roku) is what attracts me to the team. They get a lot of face time with a lot of products which means there will never be too little for me to learn. 

Since I will be at Microsoft to learn, I figure picking a group like DNM is a good way to learn a lot. Thats not to say I wouldn’t learn anything in the other groups. I just feel that at the point that I am now with my education, my weakest points are in the areas that DNM is focused and in the end would provide me with the most “bang for my/their buck” in my time at Microsoft. Hopefully that time will be a long time as the culture is very attractive.

Syndicated 2008-11-19 19:20:15 from Zac Brown

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