Q&A: Why do you do this job?
I got a couple of questions from a Dear Reader recently, asking about working for MacBU in general and why I like my job in particular. I'm going to answer the latter first; look for the former coming in a few days.
Okay, so the off-the-cuff remark to that is 'because Microsoft pays me'. Catch me at the pub and that's the answer I'll give you. But it's not really an answer to the question. After all, Microsoft would pay me to have a whole host of other jobs, and there are a whole host of other companies out there that would pay me to have other jobs [1].
The reason that I have this job is that I think I've got the coolest job at Microsoft. First of all, I get paid to work on Mac applications, which is pretty cool by itself. Even better, I get paid to work on Mac applications that have a real daily impact on the lives of literally millions of people. And, I get paid to deeply understand what Mac users want out of our applications.
It's those things together that make me love my gig. The level of complexity is high, and the target is ever-moving. I like solving hard problems, and I like the satisfaction of achieving my goals. I spent some time last week meeting some early adopters of Office 2008. One user who sticks out in my mind was a hardcore Entourage user who found My Day (found it within a few minutes of first installing Entourage), and it really works for them. They've changed their whole workflow to optimise around My Day: flagging emails so that they show up in the to-do pane of My Day, stopped using the Task window (instead adding tasks almost exclusively either through the Project Centre or directly in My Day), etc. And they're happy about it. (Which reminds me, I should talk some more about how My Day came to be, so let's add that to my queue of upcoming messages.)
That's what gets me up in the mornings. There are problems out there to solve, and these problems are ones that I'm in a unique position to solve. And if it's right, we've done a great thing. We have a very real way to help people improve their productivity and thus get to spend their time on what they want to do instead of on managing their tools.
I really do love my job. And I'm glad you asked me that. I'd been getting bogged down in the minutia of my job, and was losing sight of why I decided to take this gig in the first place. So: thanks. :)
[1] Nadyne trivia: I was an Emergency Medical Technican for ten years, so I really do have skills that don't involve pontificating about Mac users.
Comments
- Anonymous
August 27, 2008
It rocks! No, seriously, it rocks.