Five Years and Counting

Yesterday I hit my 5 year anniversary with Microsoft...the hard way.  I was a dev and a dev lead on the .NET Framework from 1997 through 2001, left for a couple of years to go back to school and then came back as the VB Product Manager last August.  I wasn't sure how the Microsoft HR machine would figure that out, but sure enough, the clock that they give you after you've been here 5 years showed up on May 19th.  There's an MS tradition that on your anniversary date, you put a pound of M&M's for each year that you've been here outside your door.  In recognition of the fact that I'd done 4.2 years and then 0.8 years, I put 4.2 pounds of M&M's and 0.8 pounds of Skittles outside my door. 

If you're reading this blog, you've probably picked up that I'm doing VB Product Management now.  Back when I was a dev, I worked on the base class libraries including some of the base data types (Object, String, Int, Double, etc), Collections, Globalization, and Serialization.  It's sort of funny to look back after being away for two years and be able to see the good and the bad of the designs, but I'm still pretty pleased with the way the BCL came out as a whole.  Some of the toughest decisions, such as whether we take the resources to pull all of the Unicode libraries into the Framework, now seem pretty obvious in retrospect.

Anyway, I'll be down at TechEd starting tomorrow evening, so I'll look forward to meeting more of you there.

jlr

Comments

• Anonymous
  May 20, 2004
  Congrats on the 5 years! :)
  
• Anonymous
  May 21, 2004
  Jay, do you still have any of those M&M's left?
• Anonymous
  June 29, 2005
  Yesterday was my 6-year anniversary at Microsoft, so I guess I was at the same orientation as Heather!...
• Anonymous
  June 29, 2005
  Yesterday was my 6-year anniversary at Microsoft, so I guess I was at the same orientation as Heather!...
• Anonymous
  June 12, 2009
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