In the Aeroplane Over ... Oregon?
Sidenote: When I typed the word “Aeroplane” in Windows Live Writer (which is actually pretty good), it put the red squiggly underline on it. When I right clicked, it suggested that maybe I meant “Aero Plane” - what does that even mean? I assume it means that it is an aircraft made out of bubbly milk chocolate (for non-Canadians, see the Nestlé Aero Bar).
A few weeks ago Clay (my uncle boss - my boss’s boss has two direct reports, one is my boss, and one is my uncle boss) said that there was an event going on in my building, where each team in Microsoft Office sets up a booth, and college recruiters walk around, and learn about the different Office teams, why they’re awesome, and what kind of candidates they should direct to each team. Clay asked me if I could remember why I ended up joining the team I did, what would be good selling points for candidates, and why it was better than a place like Xbox, where every college hire naturally wants to go. I ended up giving him some answers, but also telling him that I’d be available to man the booth with him, since it seemed like fun. And it was. I enjoyed telling recruiters what Kool-Aid to get college kids to drink in order to think UEX was fun, though I would have much preferred to talk to students themselves. When I was in school I would go to information sessions for companies and I would always wish I could be the one making the presentation, and answering the questions.
Well, yesterday I finally got my chance! On Monday, Clay said he was asked to go to Berkeley to do a tech fair where a bunch of Microsoft teams go and set up booths and tell students why their teams are great. He wasn’t going to be able to go, but figured I would want to, and he was right! It was short notice - the event was on Thursday and I only had a few days to make arrangements. I tried to throw together a bunch of plans and turn my one day trip to Berkeley into a proper vacation since I would be getting free flights, but I was foiled. My longtime pal Bon Bon (Yaron) works at Google, but was going back to Toronto on the weekend, and my friend Brian Glick who recently left MS to work for YouTube was also going to be out of town. But when I was talking to Yaron, he was saying, “too bad you’re not coming a day early, since the Raptors are playing in Oakland on Wednesday.” This was great news since I’ve gone from watching every Raptor game in a season to watching maybe 2 or 3 because of the time difference. I’ve read Raptor articles and kept up that way, but without watching the games you really lose your emotional connection to the team. You stop living and dying with the team, and stop caring as much. So yeah, I figured I could easily fly in a day early and so I was excited to be able to see a game live. And it was also a good chance to catch up with Bon Bon, and I would have missed him otherwise.
The plan was to fly into Oakland on Wednesday afternoon, do some work, see the raptor game, go to sleep, wake up, eat breakfast, do some work, drive to Berkeley, walk around campus, go to the recruiting event from 5:30-8:30, come home, go to sleep, wake up at 5am, fly out at 7am, arrive in Seattle at 9am, go to work, have a day full of meetings, have dinner with Katie (my old mentor from my Xbox internship), see Be Kind, Rewind.
Things have surprisingly gone according to plan, so the thing that makes this blog post won’t be the hilarious mishaps that happened. In fact, I’m not sure anything will “make” this blogpost. But I will just sort of describe what the recruiting event was like, and maybe you’ll find that interesting. Or maybe I will remember some funny story, and that will be the good thing about the post. Or maybe not, and you will never want to read my blog ever again. But regardless of how this turns out, it is a play-by-play sort of post, so I'm guessing it'll be long.
Berkeley campus is nice. Back when I interviewed at Google, I spent some time on Stanford campus, and it was interesting comparing the two. They both had these big clock towers --
Sidenote: Ha! Writing "clock tower" shifted my internal monologue from dictating what to write next to the old woman from the present saying, "Save the clock tower! Saaaave the clock tower!" (From Back to the Future)
-- that you could theoretically go to the top of and see a nice view. I say theoretically because both were closed when I tried to go up. They both had a ton of people walking about -
Sidenote: As I’ve been writing this post, my internal monologue has been dictating to my fingers what should come next. When I wrote that last sentence, the little voice in my head said, “walking around” not “walking --
-- Another Sidenote: They just came by with snacks and drinks and I now have a ginger ale! Ginger ale is my pop of choice, but I don’t really drink much pop these days, so aeroplanes are really the only time when I have it.
Back to the first Sidenote: - about”. I don’t know how that happened, since “walking about” is probably the kind of thing I would hear some British person say and chuckle at it and think, “I should talk like that.” But I never actually do! It appears that my fingers are tired of all the talk and figured action was necessary to get me talking more awesome. It reminds me of how when my dad drives, sometimes he just takes wrong turns because he’s used to going one way even though we need to go the other way. “The car goes where it wants”, he says. I guess that’s what’s up with my fingers, too.
- wearing school sweatshirts and t-shirts, but it feels like Berkeley made a bigger deal of their sports. I saw a bunch of references to the “Bears”, the name of their sports teams (though maybe its the "Golden Bears") and I couldn’t even tell you what the Stanford equivalent is. Stanford’s campus was more open and walking around it felt like walking around an outdoor mall, while Berkeley seemed like therj -
Sidenote: The guy in front of me just reclined his seat which is why I typed “therj” instead of “there”. His seat got caught on the top of my laptop screen and he was all confused that the seat wasn't reclining all the way. It was kinda funny. But I guess now the joke’s on me because my laptop doesn’t fit. It's times like this that a Macbook Air would seem awfully appealing. Or even my mac, as opposed to this clunky work laptop.
- there were more buildings, and that they were taller, and closer together. BUT, the area between buildings was still really nice with patches of green with places to sit, or rivers that you could sit along or gardens and that sort of thing.
At 5:15 I made my way to the Wozniak Lounge in Soda hall and waited for everyone to set up. I met a bunch of the other people who were going to be manning booths, and I recognized the recruiter who was organizing it as Katie’s boyfriend, Josh. A fun coincidence. It turns out there are a lot of people who were there from various parts of MS Office. That kinda sucks since the kids would be seeing a lot of the same product, but I know I probably have the coolest stuff to show out of everyone from Office, so that made me feel kinda good. At 6 the students start streaming in. It was kinda fun because less than a year ago, I was them. I remember going to this same event when it was at Waterloo last year, asking some of the same questions that people were asking me.
I didn’t really have any signage, or business cards, or anything that would indicate what team I was from or why people should bother asking me questions or talking to me. I was just showing off the new Office User Interface, so if I had PowerPoint open, that doesn’t really give anyone information about why I’d be interesting. So I made a slide, and had this screen showing on the monitor on my table:
Once I made this slide, I started getting more people coming up to me and asking questions. It actually inspired a bunch of great questions:
Q: It’s boring software, as long as you can write your documents, or create your spreadsheet, who cares if you love it?
A: For this question, I was happy to use a line that I heard Jensen (my grandpa boss) use in a speech he did in Las Vegas last week, “People, on average, spend more time with Microsoft Word than they do their spouse.” It’s kind of sad, but it’s even sadder if they don’t enjoy themselves during that time. Making Office enjoyable to use can have a real impact on people’s happiness in general. This question was also a good chance for me to talk about what I’ve observed about successful emotional design - “Look at the iPhone. It may have bugs, and in fact it crashes all the time, but you’ll never hear an iPhone owner complain about it to someone who doesn’t own an iPhone. They’re willing to forgive problems with it, because they love it so much. People don’t give this kind of leeway to software that they don’t like using.”
Q: OK, fine, it’s important for people to like it. How could you possibly do it? It's just a Word Processor...
A: A great question! I had two demos ready that I used to show what we had done to make people like Office better and it was all about the Ribbon (you can see it in the screenshot above - The Ribbon is the “big toolbar” at the top. I used this slideshow:
And turned it into this, with about 4 clicks:
And I didn’t have to go into one dialog box, or learn one command name. I was able to just look at a bunch of graphical choices. People said “that’s pretty”.
Then in Word, I took this doc and said I wanted to make this suitable for a magazine:
And again, making some really simple choices, without having to memorize any commands or go into any dialog boxes, I was able to turn it into this:
Everyone was impressed between these two demos. The good responses were always, “wow, I think I’m gonna upgrade”, but the best ones were when people were saying, “and your team did this? For Word AND Excel AND PowerPoint?” How did you do all that? Do you guys have internships? Room on your team? (those last two were the best to hear)
I told them about how my mom figured out how to insert a table into Word on her own, after I had shown her how to do it tons of times on Word 2003 and she never seemed to remember. She doesn't need to remember it now because she can find it all over again as easily as she did the first time.
The most rewarding thing, I think, was getting to talk one on one with people who were genuinely interested about the PM role. Talking about what they are interested in, and telling them which teams and what role really has what they want. I encouraged people to e-mail me if they have any questions about anything, and I really wanted to make them feel like they had a friend in the company. I don't know how well it worked, but it was fun to try.
The funny thing, though, is that I didn't get a whole lot of time for that 1 on 1 kind of talk. The trouble with having a cool demo is that if one person comes up and asks you a question, and then you stat demoing to asnwer their question, if the thing you're showing off is at all interesting, you quickly get a crowd around you. It's tough then to direction chat with the one person because the audience is so much larger. I really enjoyed getting a bunch of people interested with what we do on UEX, but it's hard to personalize it with a big group watching you. I felt kind of bad because the people next to me (Excel and SharePoint) complained that I was drawing people away from them with my demos. Such is life when you work on the User Experience team, I guess.
Some of the teams got to do presentations (on the big projector, and the microphone talking to the whole room at once), and hopefully next time I get to do something like that. You know, if there is a next time.
After the tech fair some of the people at the booths and the recruiters went out for a drink in Berkeley. We had a surprisingly hard time finding a bar to go to, but eventually we did, and I had quite a good time. It's always nice getting to chat with people who do things that you aren't too familiar with. And then eventually I went home, got 5 hours of sleep. Woke up, got to the airport to find my flight delayed by 4 hours, got rescheduled to a different flight so I only had to wait 2.5 hours, landed, got to work at around noon, and worked for a good long while.
Portia and I bought slices of pie for everyone in the office and distributed them at 1:59 PM to celebrate Pi Day (It is March 14th, so at 1:59, it was 3/14@1:59 ... 3.14159, which are the first 6 digits of Pi. It's a thing we picked up at Waterloo where every Pi Day we would get free pie in the math building which was always yummy.
Happy Pi Day, everybody!