First day, and something new!

Today was NEO (New Employee Orientation) here in Redmond. We broke a record with the number of new people in one orientation class – over 300! It was really great being able to see that much talent together, and even more amazing hearing all of the different places people are coming to Redmond from – Colombia, Ireland, India, Texas – all the big countries represented. ;)

It does remind this Americanized employee how many quirks there are over here that new citizens have to understand. Like tax forms (“Fill out your W4! And think about your 401K if you want it pre or post tax or Roth – and you can choose your health plan and have it roll over if you do a Health Savings Plan, but if you have a Health Savings Account it is pretax but is use it or lose it…”). But also simple things like Sick Time being really time-off for anything you need to get done (meaning, no, you don’t need a doctor’s note). Or where certain states are geography-wise.

It also showed me how passionate people are about working for Microsoft, and how really comprehensive their benefits are. In addition, a lot of discussion surrounded things that have changed to make the company more open to the employees. So it may not be the devil (as one friend called it), but I’m still reserving the evil empire barb for now. ;)

Speaking of Microsoft, it turns out I was quoted in an article in the magazine Application Development Trends sometime last year. Occasionally I do Google searches for my name to see what is out there, but seeing as how I’m an MS employee, I thought I would give Live Search a spin. Turns out it found the article – something I had not seen on Google. So congrats to that team – I might have to add a bookmark soon.

Speaking of Google – there’s an interesting discussion going on at the Maverick Software Development list about Google and Agile. Interestingly one of my new coworkers has also interviewed with Google, and also left with a bad taste in his mouth – though his interviewer called him “dense” – much worse that just being told that they “don’t like the way you think”.

I’ll close out with a post from my friend Ted Carnahan who got his first acknowledgment in CPAN for some work he did on Test::Class. He’s doing some cool stuff with Perl – and I hope he keeps blogging it. ;)

Off to bed to get some rest before bootcamp starts tomorrow.