Making Mufflers at Microsoft

It's Midyear Check In time at Microsoft this month. At this point, we all sit down with our managers and have a good discussion about our long term careers. This is much different from status updates in which we talk about the state of OneNote, automation and tools, reporting, bugs, etc.… This is focused on where we all want to be three, five to twenty years down the road. Some testers here, especially those that are just starting, can struggle a little bit with this distinction. To help explain this difference, I have an analogy I figured I should share (and I'm a big believer in analogies).

Imagine Bob was hired at a car company to work on installing mufflers on the new cars. And Bob LOVES cars, and mufflers in particular. He throws himself into his job and starts welding mufflers into the new cars. After a few months, he masters all aspects of welding the mufflers into place and becomes the top muffler installer.

He isn't content with this, though. He starts to notice more efficient ways to install mufflers and meets with the car designers to make changes to the processes, lowering costs of installing mufflers by 10%.

As time goes by, Bob begins to notice the failure rate of mufflers is seemingly high. Bob investigates and find that the mufflers that use a certain type of steel fail due to rust after about 8 years. He sets up a team to choose a different metal and helps create a muffler that will last twice as long. He also notices that some cars simply look better with 2 mufflers than one, and helps the designers modify the mufflers to fit the redesigned car. Sales of those cars start to increase.

So after about 10 years, Bob has become the muffler expert. There is no question he cannot answer and has literally written the book the company uses to install mufflers.

And then the company decides to make all electric cars. (For the non mechanically savvy readers, electric cars do not use mufflers at all).

So now what does Bob do?

The situation arose because he has focused on only one specific technology and spent all his time and resources in investing in that one item (mufflers). He spent too little time investing in his long term career. And now a change the company made has exposed a tragic flaw with this work style.

So the tasks Bob could have done along the way, even while mastering mufflers, that would have helped his long term career are:

1. While welding, he could have studied more techniques about joining metals together.
2. Failure rates could have led to studying the different failure points of the cars in general. Now when the company goes to electric cars, he could modify the elements he is studying for failure rates.
3. Leading the teams to make changes could have been a natural lead in to building leadership skills

And so on.

So the point behind our discussions will be to identify what is important to the individual and how we can fit tasks that help reach those goals into our day to day work, and if we are getting stuck in our day to day tasking and losing sight of our long term goals.

Let me know what you think about his analogy.

Questions, comments, concerns and criticisms always welcome,
John