One of my recent hires, Rory Browning, moved up to the Seattle area from Southern California.  He has definitely adjusted to the Northwest life and is enjoying snowboarding, mountain biking, wakeboarding, etc.  Check out those jumps!

 

   

 

There are many more fun activities for the extreme sport atheletics, families, or individuals not quite ready for life on the edge.  :)

You don't have to take it from me that Search is a great place to join.  Here are some quotes from our new employees. 

 

"What I like most about working in the Microsoft Search team is that I have the chance to change things in a significant way.  Our product does not yet dominate the market and my work and my ideas are going to make a difference as to whether it will fail or succeed.  There are not many areas left in software engineering where you can directly influence something that will determine how millions upon millions of people all over the world will view and find the Internet."

 

Bert Casper

Senior Development Lead

Shopping Platforms

 

 

"The thing that I like most about working at Microsoft is that you are not only hired for your ability to think and problem solve but also given the opportunity to do so each and every day.  This is especially rewarding within the Search team because the challenges being faced daily are at a scale and magnitude not often encountered by online services.  Furthermore, it is very gratifying knowing that you ultimately play a part in providing new and innovative ways to connect people with the information they are searching for."

 

Gabe Wishnie

Software Development Engineer in Test

Infrastructure

You might be asking yourself, why should I join the Search team when there are other cool business groups at Microsoft?  Why should I join Microsoft and not a competitor company?  These are great questions that I'm hoping I can sum up below.

 

Microsoft is almost a 80,000 employee company but we sure don't run like one.  Each business group has their own philosophy on how software should be developed and all of them function differently.  If you look at the Core Search business, we are approximately 475 employees in 8 teams, spanning 3 disciplines (SDE, Test, PM).  If you break it down even further, there are about 20-45 employees per team on the development side...  talk about a small group.  You get to work in individually in small teams yet still get the financial funding from a large company.  No need to worry about your start-up running out of money anymore.

 

We innovate, innovate, innovate.  We don't stop until we are #1 in the industry.  You could work at Microsoft your whole career and still wouldn't be able to solve all of the technical, complex challenges that we face.  I know the reason some of you are exploring new opportunities right now is because you've finished your part in your current project and don't have much to do anymore.  Like I mentioned, there is so much to work here, you won't face this problem. 

 

We value our employees and ensure they are treated only the best.  I won't go into everything that our employees get.  You can view the benefits plan from the links on the right, but 100% paid medical care for you and your dependents, free WiFi shuttle buses to take you to/from work, flextime (I work part-time on MWF), discounted hardware/software at the company store at only a fraction of the cost, and 100 hours of back-up childcare are some of my favorite perks here.

 

Microsoft sounds like a great place to work, but why Search?  We use to outsource our search engine to Inktomi, but in February 2005, we brought it in-house.  We're only 3 years old, yet we're the third best search engine in the world!  Now we want to win and be the best in the search industry.  We've been improving our existing engine as you can see in our latest release.  The latest version of Live Search has quadrupled our index to 20 billion websites, added differentiated vertical experiences in key areas, enhanced the user experience, and improved the relevance results for the billions of queries done by our over 185 million worldwide customers every month!  Wouldn't you want to indulge in cutting-edge technologies to build the coolest search engine?  We have it all: data mining, natural language processing, machine learning, heavy cross over with research, incubation projects, relevance, networking, UX, shopping and much, much more.  As a software professional, you have many paths to advance your career but this is the group you'll experience only the best. 

 

Here's a quote from Steve Ballmer about Live Search and how we're going to win:

 

"Hey, you know, you're just three years old and we've got you in there playing basketball with the 12-year-olds, and you know what? You're growing up quick, you're getting better every day, and you've got all the potential in the world. If it takes you until you're six, seven, eight, nine, 10—but you're gonna dunk, and you're gonna dunk every other guy some day."

 

And we will win too.  :)