Leaving Microsoft
As I write this, San Francisco is receding in the distance as my flight wends its way north to Seattle. I woke up at 4:00 am for an early flight. By the time I’m back in Woodinville, home and in bed, it will be after 11pm. What a day it has been.
This morning I announced my departure from Microsoft after over 20 years with the company in an email. I sat at the Virgin America gate, finished the mail, clicked “Send,” and boarded my flight. By the time I’d landed in San Francisco, my inbox had filled up with an outpouring of wonderful messages from old friends and colleagues. I had no idea how hard saying goodbye would be.
When I first joined Microsoft, I was 18 years old, an intern, and a student at the University of Waterloo. U of W has a pretty well-known co-operative education program, and back in 1987, I did my first job interviews, looking for a position for that summer’s work term. I interviewed with many different companies, from small start-ups to IBM. But what I really wanted to do was work for Microsoft.
Back then, the company was famous for flying in developers from Redmond and giving the third- and fourth-year students the grilling of their life. Unfortunately, as a first-year student, I wasn’t qualified to apply for those jobs. When I scanned through the job listings, I was thrilled to discover that Microsoft Canada also had slots to fill. First year students could apply for those positions. And while my buddies decided to wait and look for a Microsoft gig in Redmond in a few years, I didn’t want to wait. I just knew I wanted to be there.
Some of you reading this might not understand that sentiment, especially given Microsoft’s image today. But this was 1987, ages ago in the technology industry. Computers were in a tiny fraction of households and businesses, and things like Windows or the Web were years and years away. Microsoft then was less than a thousand people, unknown to all but the geekiest of the geeks. And they made some of the best products you could find.
Computer software, in the early days of the PC industry, was often written by small, unknown companies whose efforts could charitably be called amateur. But Microsoft products were created by developers who cared about creating smart architectures and elegant designs. Microsoft Excel — then, v1.0 and available only on the Mac — made every other spreadsheet seem archaic by comparison. And while WordPerfect held sway over the majority of PC users, Microsoft Word (for DOS) to me was far superior, with a more approachable user interface and an internal structure that made powerful features such as styles, macros and forms easy to support.
I desperately wanted to work for the company that made such clever products.
And so, my job fresh out of my first year as a Computer Engineering student, was to staff the phone lines for Product Support. Hardly the most glamorous of positions, it was about as close to “starting in the mail room” as one could imagine. But I still remember the day when I heard I’d been offered the job; it was nothing short of a dream come true.
I was told by my hiring manager that, out of the twenty folks she interviewed that day on campus, I was the only one who actually knew what “Product Support” actually was. Apparently, that clinched the deal enough to set me up for the next two decades.
Which brings me back to today.
I’m thrilled with my new role at ClickStream. Going off on my own to build a business is something I’ve wanted to do for a long, long time. It’s my new “dream come true.”
But I’ll never forget my first. And today, forced to look back on that chapter of my life in an email to the many great friends I’ve made over the years, I found it to be just a little bit harder than I thought it would be.
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