In the Aeroplane Over ... Oregon?

[jgordner]

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

Comments

[decidedlyodd]

That's really kickass that you got to go to Berkeley. Even as an alum, it's very difficult to get on recruiting trips there. They have a whole organized recruiting team for Berkeley that you have to apply for. Plus, I think they often just get people from SVC to drive in for the day as opposed to flying people out from Seattle. I hear getting on a recruiting trip to Waterloo is all but impossible because there are so many damn alums who work at Microsoft who'd jump at the chance to visit.

I did do a recruiting trip to UNC though about 2 years ago, which was a lot of fun. There are hardly any UNC alums at Microsoft (there's no engineering there, just a CS department), so recruiting is always looking for alum volunteers for events. Last time I was there, I gave a talk about the Ribbon that was based on some slides I borrowed from Jensen. There was a lot of positive response from the audience, although UNC is a fairly Microsoft friendly place (unlike Cal IMHO). A lot of people came into the talk with the attitude of "what the hell have they done to my precious menus and toolbars?!?" but left understanding why we did something so radical. That was a pretty cool feeling. This was about 2 months before Office 2007 RTM too when the betas were still out, before many people had even laid eyes on the Ribbon.

[jgordner]

Yeah, the opportunity kind of fell into my lap. On short notice, they were a few people short for this, and they asked Clay to do it because the UEX booth was kinda cool at the recruiting thing we did a few weeks ago. I was just really lucky, I guess.

I've wanted to get to go back to Waterloo, but you're right -- it's near impossible to get on the waterloo recruiting team. Maybe now that I have some experience with these, the recruiter might be a little more willing.

You know, even though Office 2007 has been out for over a year, a surprising number of people there had never seen the new UI before. Maybe it's 'cause they go to such a Microsoft-unfriendly school :)