Last December I made two posts about how busy I was at work:
About 10 days ago while I was in Louisville our Corporate VP held a meeting for all the people under him. I missed out on the big meeting but I’ve watched part of the video of it since then. One of the topics at the meeting was awards for various people. My officemate, Sapna, mentioned in one the previous posts, our PM, our test/system integration guy and I got one of the awards. Here is a screen capture from that video:
I told Barb about this and she thought it was pretty cool… until I told her what we had done. We designed/wrote/tested some of the website code that puts ads on mobile phones (like what you see here depending on what country you are in) for our mobile websites.
Barb’s response was basically “ads are evil”. But ads are the reason so much of the Internet is “free” just like most television programs and radio. For example Hotmail requires dozens of servers with massive amounts of storage and bandwidth. Ads pay for those resources. There haven’t been many ads on a lot of mobile phones for various reasons but that is changing and my little team (above) helped change that.
I find the diversity of our team interesting. Sapna is from India and on Monday participated in a folk-life event at the Seattle Center attended by some large number of people. She and about a dozen others put on several dances from India. I showed up and took a bunch of pictures. At 5′ 3″ and 110 pounds she doesn’t look like a software geek:
Taqi is from Pakistan (don’t India and Pakistan lob expolsives and high speed pieces of metal at each other on a regular basis? Odd–they get alone so well here.) and when he visits “home” I sometimes ask him about what “training camps” he spent time in. He takes it quite well and tells me stories from his time, years ago, in the military–which he makes of point of telling me was the secular military. He is about to finish his master’s degree from the U of W in physics.
Zane is of Asian descent and a Canadian citizen who loves to play basketball. Snowboarding is also up there on his list of things to do.
All of them are great people and I’m proud to work with them. However, I’m sometimes intimidated here at Microsoft. If you open your mouth about something you should know what you are talking about because I suspect the average I.Q. in our section of the building is probably about 150. Damn, these guys are smart.
Grats! Reward well earned.
Sapna is too cute to be called a geek. “Digital diva” maybe, especially since she is also a performer.
Anyway; Congratulations all. I’m sure we’ll all be looking forward to purchasing some of those ads.
There truly is a lot of diversity in our team!
Having a high IQ is no form of protection from opening your mouth and looking like an idiot. I know this from experience. I’d look twice as smart to my coworkers if I didn’t think better out loud.