New Employee Orientation day! Me and David woke up early at 7:00 and finished Sunday’s supply of instant ramen. We left the house at 8:40 after I convinced him that would be plenty of time to make it to the Microsoft Visitors Center by 9:30.
Since neither of us checked the building’s location before leaving I was very wrong. We went two blocks too far south. We asked the desk at one of the buildings, south of the Microsoft studios, for directions and they gave us an updated map. Every other map I had seen prior was missing the new Microsoft game studios and the Commons Cafeteria. I have since lost this awesome map otherwise I would post it.
The orientation itself assisted us through about 3 sheets of dense legal forms. I messed up and wrote my birthday under this current year (2013) and a Microsoft lawyer even caught the mistake then and there.
After orientation, or NEO in microsoft speak, we headed off to our team’s office’s, but not before we all got free launch and a t-shirt.
This makes three Microsoft t-shirts!
Upon arrival my team was in a bi-weekly trio meeting. A trio meeting is when test, dev, and project management gets together and checks on progress. Since I am in Sustained Engineering progress means bugs. Of course we are now getting into NDA territory. All I can say is that there were indeed bugs, and that progress was being made on fixing unsaid bugs.
I spent the next day or two, or three, configuring my workstation and reading. A major portion of this amounted to acquiring source files and building. On one hand I miss Linux’s tradition of everything using make files. On the other hand building Windows means building what would amount to a full distro in the linux world. Compared to the distros’ build farms Microsoft has developed a convenient build process.
The view from my temporary office. A recent re-organization left open an office right between my mentor and our boss. I may move before the summer is over.
My roommate, David, ran the same test so I know I cannot be alone in this curiosity.
Microsoft’s free pop will either cure my suger habit or cure my healthy BMI. This first day I went overboard but I have since been drinking more tea. I am not alone with the tea; this floor of the building alone is consuming about half a box of green tea bags per week.
Update 2013-10: If you are still interested please consider reading through the overview of my internship.