It’s March, and I haven’t written in almost a month! I’ve had my head down and been busy making some changes. I figured now that the dust has settled a little bit, I can talk about the most major one.
Let’s rip the band-aid off: I have a new job! Officially starting on March 16th, I will be making an internal transfer within Microsoft from my current team to FUSE Labs, where I will be working as a Senior Software Engineering Manager on the Bot Framework Solutions team. I am incredibly excited about the opportunity, and cannot wait to get stuck in on my new team.
So, how did this all come about? Let’s rewind a little bit.
After speaking with my counselor and doing a lot of reflecting, I realized that the time had come for me to do something about my work situation, as I had been feeling particularly stressed out and unhappy. I didn’t know exactly what to do – I just knew I needed to do something. Little did I know that the universe was about to send me a sign.
At the start of February, I took some time off to go visit my brother in Malaysia (pro tip: the Hotel Majestic in Kuala Lumpur is amazing!), and on a spur of the moment decision I started looking through our internal job postings. As I leafed through over four hundred different postings, I eventually found one that immediately caught my attention that had only just been posted on the same day. I wonder if you can guess which job it was?
I immediately contacted the hiring manager and scheduled an informational so that I could find out more about the job. After returning from my vacation and getting together, I immediately started getting the warm fuzzy feeling of genuine excitement about the role, the team and the tech – a feeling that I don’t think I’ve felt about work in quite some time. There have been individual moments and the occasional project that I’ve particularly enjoyed, and the people have been great – but the focal area of my current position has never been particularly exciting for me.
From there, I went through a whirlwind experience of updating my resume, applying for the position, scheduling and performing a day of interviews, and being offered the position in less than two weeks from my initial informational. I had convinced myself that I had done terribly in my technical interviews, and I am certain in myself that I could have done better if I had more focused time to prepare beforehand – but regardless, the entire round of interviewers apparently liked me enough that they all opted to hire!
So, what was it that particularly drew me to the role?
For starters, it involves a location change – I will be moving from Redmond to Bellevue, which I am actually quite excited about for a number of reasons. It will ideally mean a significantly easier and shorter commute which, given how much time I seem to spend stuck in traffic on the 520 these days, is a huge win. Looking to the future, it will also be perfectly situated near the new light rail station that will be built in Bellevue, which will further simplify the commute. On top of this, there seems to be a healthy balance in working from home and at the office, which has all sorts of positive gains.
One of the firm realizations that I have come to while reflecting and attending counseling sessions has been perhaps quite an obvious one, but important nonetheless: it is hugely important to feel passionate about what I do, while being surrounded by like-minded individuals who support me.
I would say that for a good amount of my career, I feel like I’ve been lacking a clear direction. That is not to say that I’ve not enjoyed my work so far – quite the opposite! I have had the pleasure of working with some amazing people, and I have learned so much from everyone around me. I’ve become a much engineer for my experiences that I have had, as well as a better leader to my team. These formative experiences have helped me get to this point, and so I will always be thankful for them.
However, importantly, I’ve learned a lot about what sparks me, as well as things that I really don’t enjoy. When I tried to cast my mind back to things that I enjoyed, I think of my time in university where I was learning to make games. Sure, most of them were terrible, but the process itself was fun and rewarding because of the reaction that I got from others when they tried them. Making a fun user experience and trying new ideas was a way for me to express my creativity beyond just simply writing lines of code.
In particular, my dissertation was a big focal point in this thought journey: my study into the use of speech recognition in adventure games. I crafted up a pretty basic point-and-click inspired game in Microsoft XNA using a Kinect as a source of audio input for speech, with the idea that users could just simply utter commands to the game and have it respond. I have long held a belief that modern technology – while progressively becoming smarter and more powerful – still holds a large entry barrier for many users in terms of usability. One of the things that defines us as a species is our ability to communicate, and so the thought of interacting with computers using something as natural as a conversation to me is a really cool concept.
Last year, I took part in Microsoft’s annual Hackathon, where I spent a few days using the Bot Framework to build a simple operational assist targeted towards some of my team’s business partners to help them with common daily tasks. Although very much a simple proof of concept, the technology was surprisingly easy to use, and allowed us to take a process that was highly error prone and boil it down into easy-to-use guided steps that could interpret what the user said and smartly understand how to perform actions based on it. Demoing it to people yielded exactly the result I was hoping for: they could see the potential in the technology, and all talked about how it could transform their day-to-day lives at work.
It was this simple realization that, even looking at my most recent significant project at work which was one of my favorite projects I’ve undertaken in my career so far, I am incredibly passionate about user experience. I want to help build smart, intuitive and fun experiences that can really benefit people in all aspects of their lives.
And that is exactly what this role offers: the ability to work with customers and a developer ecosystem to help define this cool technology, and the ability to help build conversational AI experiences that can benefit people in a wide range of different areas.
Sometimes it can be really hard to make a big change. This one is definitely going to be a big step for me – I am leaving behind people that have helped guide me through my career thus far, and a great team of people that I have greatly enjoyed being around. However, when you have such a strong feeling of excitement and deep-seated passion about an opportunity, that’s how you know that you need to take it while you can.
It’s certainly going to be even more challenging given the current COVID-19 situation that is going on in Seattle at the moment. Despite all of that, I know that I am making the right decision for myself based on where I have been in my own pursuit of improving my mental health and happiness. This is a chance to take everything I’ve learned and put it into practice while working on a product that brings me great joy, and I look forward to it immensely.
Time to get stuck in!
Seattle Scotsman 
YAY! Good for you sweet heart! I think there are few times in our lives when you can literally feel sister fate putting those bricks down to create your path to happiness. Take a walk out of the clouds and walk in your joy. I am so happy for you!
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