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Tough medicine
I’m not sure a spoonful of sugar will help in these rough times in the economy, but it certainly could at least help you feel better for a short moment. Catching up on news from this week I came across TechCrunch launching the f@%kedcompany for the new downturn: The TechCrunch Layoff Tracker.
To intro the page the have a great graph that espouses what I’ve been saying for a long time … if your company is having issues or entering tough times cut early, cut ONCE, and cut deep. I’ve lived through not doing that in the last dotcom bubble burst in 2000-2001. The company I worked for went through seemingly endless layoff rounds and morale was totally shot. We were eventually purchased for about half the amount of cash we had on hand … bought with our own money.
Essentially, if you make a deep cut in workforce early in a downturn sure there’s a morale hit, but at the same time the core group of folks who are left know that management is serious about preserving the company – and their jobs. If management decides to cut a few jobs here and there “so as not to make anyone worry” they’re actually doing the opposite – who knows when you could be next.
So in the last couple weeks we’ve heard of lots of layoffs from companies that are well funded (Zillow for one). While a lot of folks are viewing this as a sign of the economy tanking (and I don’t disagree there), I think this is more of a sign of CEO’s making the right decisions for the good of the business and the majority of their employees. Sure it sucks to be the 1 in 4 employees laid off from Zillow, but 3 in 4 now have a good fighting chance of riding through this recession in one piece.
If only my former employers heeded these lessons…
You’re a maverick!
Gotta love the Inter-tubes…
Back to our regular programing
For the last couple weeks we’ve been glued to the TV watching various events from the Olympics. It’s been great to watch all the swimming, and track events, and see some of the stuff that you never really get to watch but for every 4 years (rowing, whitewater, etc.). [What’s the deal with trampoline as an Olympic sport? That’s just nuts!] We even watched a bunch of events while we were on vacation the first week of the games. Kaitlyn tells us she wants to be a 10M platform diver. 🙂 We’ll see.
Tonight we watched the closing ceremonies on NBC in HD – the fireworks and other bits of eye candy look so much better in HD. That being said, for the past 2 weeks we’ve been pretty firmly planted “north of the border” watching the Games on CBC. That’s right, Comcast carries Vancouver, BC, Canada’s CBC channel here in the states. AND THANK GOODNESS FOR THAT!
We’d watch an event one evening live, and then notice that the same stuff was getting replayed 18 hours later on NBC. Especially crappy was when NBC did decided to show something live they only did so for for the east coast of the US. They tape-delayed EVERYTHING for the west coast, but still kept the “LIVE” banner on the screen. Can’t the FCC get them for false advertising? And don’t get me started on the inappropriate and moronic comments that Bob Costas feels like filling airtime with. Spare me.
Next time, especially with Vancouver hosting the Winter games in February 2010 we’ll be watching a LOT of CBC. I only hope Comcast starts carrying their HD feed here in the states by then.
I read a story this evening on Engadget HD that at least gives me hope … ESPN is thinking of bidding for the 2014 and 2016 games and promises to never tape delay anything. NICE! I can’t wait to watch Olympic dodgeball on ESPN 8 … The Ocho!
For those frustrated by NBC’s arrogant mishandling of its broadcast rights, there exists one slim ray of hope (other than living somewhere lucky enough to get Canadian television so you can actually see the events before reading about them in the paper or on NBC’s own website), ESPN. That’s right, with Brett Favre finally on an NFL roster, the sports giant has apparently found enough free time to consider taking a run at broadcast rights for the 2014 Winter Games and 2016 Summer Games.
Saying something
I mentioned the other day that I couldn’t say anything… and at the time I couldn’t. But that’s since changed. :-) The first couple days of the week I got to help with a couple ISA Server exam refreshes, so there’s part of the mystery. And here’s the other part…
I’ll be in the New Employee Orientation session at Microsoft’s Redmond campus on Monday, July 28th. :-) I’m joining the Global Foundation Services group to help run the infrastructure behind behind a little program you may have heard of called Live Messenger (it does instant messaging, or “IM” as they say – evidently all the kids are doing it these days).
I’m truly honored and humbled to have even been considered, much less offered a position on the team and with Microsoft. I’ve always had a goal to work for Microsoft, going all the way back to college (I even interviewed with MS my senior year). I thought I’d gotten as close to that as I was going to when I spent 2.5 years working at Cascade Investment (I received annual “head-nods acknowledging my existence from Bill Gates during my tenure).
About 6 weeks ago I read a blog post by Dare Obasanjo talking about the availability problems of Twitter of late, and how the architecture decisions they made in the beginning lead to some of their issues today (and limit what they can do to easily resolve them). At the end of his post he throws in something that really grabbed my attention: “If this problem space sounds interesting to you, we’re hiring. I’m specifically looking for good operations folks.”
That got my mind running … designing and implementing systems at huge scale has always been an area of interest for me, but I’ve never found myself in a spot to actually be doing it. After a day or so of mulling things over in my mind I bit the bullet and sent an email to a friend who’s been on the Live Operations team (now GFS) for a couple years to get his take on things. His reply was a shocker: “I work directly with Dare on a current project I would love to have you onboard.”
I don’t know if that was a sign or not, but things sure did go quickly after that. All told I had about 9 hours of phone calls, lunches, and onsite interview sessions. These were perhaps the most grueling interviews in my life (I really haven’t interviewed cold for a new job since January 2000), but at the same time it was a lot of fun!
There’s something to be said for asking someone a demanding question they have no way of knowing the answer to (or maybe there is no answer) and evaluating their thought process, analytical skills, and ability to ask good questions. The next time I have to interview someone I definitely have to work some of this technique into the mix.
I’ve always heard and known that Microsoft’s interview process is a gauntlet that is exceptionally difficult to pass. I never thought I’d have what it takes to make it through, especially interviewing for a position that runs such a large-scale system when my background is clearly in the SMB range (small/medium business). A couple of the folks I spoke with, though, said that if they went looking for people with experience in the scale of systems GFS deals with they wouldn’t be able to find anyone; find a smart person who fits the team and they can learn the details.
So that’s the challenge for me in the coming months … get up to speed on a completely new system, scale, architecture, paradigm. It’s going to be tough, and it’s going to take a lot of hard work. But I’m excited for the challenge; to be outside of the comfort zone that I’ve built up over the last 10 years.
I can’t wait to get this next chapter act in my career started! Wish me luck!
PS – a special thanks to Alicea, Barton, Brian, and Bryce for sticking by me through all this. Your insights and simply just being there to listen have been invaluable. YOU ROCK!
Not saying anything
There’s SO much stuff going on in my life I just can’t talk about publicly right now … and it’s eating me up! There’s the whole big [redacted] that I can’t talk about. Plus there’s another possible [redacted] that I can’t tell you about either. And then for the next two days I’m going to be [redacted] which I think is completely cool and am really looking forward to … plus it pays really well!
Whew … okay, thanks for letting me spill the beans about all that. 🙂
I hope to be able to share my thoughts more about all this before the week is out. I don’t know if I could go another weekend without having [redacted] finalized and put to bed.
Speaking of bed … it’s 11:30p! Yikes!
No more tunes at Starbucks?
BUMMER! I actually kind of like having media available at the checkout. I’ve scored a couple nice selections that way (2-disc Police set, and the movie Juno). Oh well…
Report: Starbucks scaling back music offering | Tech news blog – CNET News.com
Hanging in there…
For those of you who know me, you know that one of my standard answers if asked “how are you doing?” is “hanging in there.” Well today I can honestly say that’s an apt description. I haven’t felt this crappy in a LONG time.
These last 6-8 weeks have been the absolute worst season for my allergies I’ve ever experienced. EVER. It’s so bad that I’ve even been diagnosed with allergy-induced asthma – oye vay.
So if you see me around and I’m not my normal cheery self, now you know why. Bleh.
TechEd day 5
Whew. Maybe I can start getting more sleep now that TechEd is done. Oh wait, no, I have to meet my ride to the airport tomorrow morning at 5:30a.
The first session today was about the new Server Core platform for Windows Server 2008. Essentially they’ve stripped out all of the UI and superfluous apps and tools from Windows and created a lean and mean OS for specific “workloads” (Microsoft’s new term for what a server is used for). A Server Core installation is managed via standard remote MMC tools, or via command line on the box itself. The workloads Server Core is used for include a domain controller, file server, print server, basic web server (no .NET), or virtualization server (Hypervisor). It’s going to be a bit of a change to get used to administering these boxes, but I like the concept.
Next I attended another discussion on Microsoft’s Virtualization platform. THIS is the session I was expecting to see on the first day. There was a fair bit of content overlap, but we actually got some good technical information on Windows Server 2008 Virtualization and had a nice Q&A session. I feel better about what’s coming with Windows Server 2008’s Hypervisor, but if I had to deploy a production environment right now it would be tough for me to not do use VMware ESX.
I finished off my conference sessions the way I began, with a security talk by Steve Riley. This one was about securing mobile devices (laptops). Steve spent a lot of time talking about BitLocker in Windows Vista, which utilizes special chips in newer laptops called TPM modules. I won’t get too technical, but Steve did a great job of explaining how all this works. I might even be tempted to try it sometime … though I’d need to wipe my laptop to do it as BitLocker needs a disk partition that’s outside your OS to keep unencrypted for some types of application installers. The official recommendation is 1.5GB of space, though according to Steve he hasn’t had any issues with a volume only 55MB.
And that was that. I hung out with Will Strye from our Portland office this afternoon & evening. We walked across the way to Downtown Disney and saw a movie (Oceans Thirteen – liked it).
After we got out we hung out by the lake for a couple minutes and were treated to a view of the Space Shuttle Atlantis lifting off from Kennedy Space Center 45 miles east. WOW. Awe inspiring. Goose bump moment. We were too far away to see the shuttle, but we saw a long trail of fire and the smoke trail from the rockets. We watched it through rocket separation and until we couldn’t see the glow of the main engines anymore. I’ll remember that forever. Will try to get some pictures posted from Will’s phone soon. A couple guys from Ascentium drove out to the coast this afternoon so I’ll get some pics from them too. 🙂
Well, time to pack!
TechEd 2007 – OUT!
Great – more work
It’s not like I didn’t know we were running out of IP addresses, but I had heard that the rate at which we were consuming what’s left was slowing down. Bummer that it’s not.
According to ARIN, the American Registry for Internet Numbers (via NeoWin) we’re going to be out of IP addresses to dole out to organizations in late 2010. Zoinks!
Time to get cracking on IPv6 I suppose. Right after I finish deploying Exchange 2007, Unified Messaging, Office Communications Server 2007, complete a pending merger integration, complete another pending merger integration, move our main offices, and do whatever else comes up between now and mid-2010. 🙂
Hurray for travel…
I said yesterday that I’ve wanted to come to TechEd for a long time. Why couldn’t I have gone a couple years ago in San Diego? This year it’s in Orlando … in the opposite corner of the country from Seattle.
To make matters worse the ticketing gods sent me from Seattle to Los Angeles, and then on to Orlando. Yeah – that’s direct.
I get to the airport and the wait for the transfer bus to the hotels is an hour plus. The wait for taxies is about 3 minutes (but they cost 3x. After getting up at 4a I’m done with mass transit for the day. 🙂
As a bonus I got Speedy Gozales for a cabbie. I got to my hotel long before the bus would have even left!
The hotel? under construction on the main floor. You have to enter through a wing entrance and then walk back to the other end of the complex to check in. And it’s tough to grab an elevator in the middle of scaffolding.
And what’s the deal with all the guys walking around without shirts on … oh my, there’s a different convention here this weekend too. You haven’t lived until you’ve seen a 6-foot-7 black 200 pound black guy in skimpy “boy shorts” on roller blades in the lobby of your hotel.
As I was checking a heavy-set mid-50’s guy from Alabama (guessing) came up to the front desk demanding to check out without being charged because of the “outrageous displays” parading around the hotel. He was offended. I love how tolerant our culture is of people who are different.
This should be an interesting week.
Nathan's Occasional Blog 