Cross team pollination

Change is the really the only constant of the Universe, if you can be certain of something is that things and people change over time. Switching teams is probably one of the most common types of change that people working at Microsoft live through and I’m not talking so much about re-organizations as much as voluntary switches across teams.

But why do people switch teams? There are myriad reasons, some positive some not so much, but in my limited experience I can confidently say that in the majority of cases I’ve observed it is simply for the thrill of trying/learning something new.

When I decided to switch pretty much all my colleagues asked me why? I was thriving (I think J) on my old team, I was offered a lot of freedom to decide what to work on for the next release and I really, really enjoyed working with my previous manager. And yet I switched. And my “Moving on” e-mail was just one of several that now ex-crm folks have sent. Is there some sort of anomaly with the CRM team? Nope, not at all, in fact the team is in pretty good shape and people like me really had a hard time making a decision. Yet when you work for a company like Microsoft it would be a shame not to take advantage of possibilities offered by other teams; the company has such wide array of products and technologies that usually the question is not should I switch? Rather, where to switch?

Suddenly my network of acquaintances in other teams has exploded. Now I know folks that work on Xbox, Office, Visual Studio, Windows Client and Server, Window Phone, Zune, Dynamics, Bing, AdCenter etc. Most of them CRM alumni J

I once read an interview with a fellow that worked for Steve Jobs (can’t recall the name) and he mentioned that one of the best things about Steve Jobs was his ability to “connect the dots” and that he was really good at it because he had a lot of experiences that had given him a lot of dots to connect, well, change is precisely about that, about having more dots to connect.

I won’t lie, it’s hard to be a “newbie” again to some extent but as time goes by I hope to report that it was worth it (so far so good).

And why am I boring you with all of this? Well, because I’m super excited about all the stuff happening for the new release of Office and Sharepoint (BIIIG time) and given that I can’t share any of it I had to write something else to appease me.

Now, back to the ton of stuff that I’m supposed to be learning J