Today marks my 25th anniversary of full-time work in tech.
June 18, 2001 – My third “New Employee Orientation” at Microsoft, starting my full-time employment after University. I worked on the Office Online PM team for three years before moving to the Internet Explorer Networking and Security teams for 8 more, eventually leading a team of PMs.
September 29, 2012 – I resigned from Microsoft to move to Austin and build Fiddler at Telerik.
January 4, 2016 – I started on the Chrome Security team at Google. Working at Google was an amazing experience and while I wasn’t supposed to be a software engineer, I managed to survive long enough to learn a ton.
June 4, 2018 – I rejoined Microsoft to work on the Edge Web Platform team. Using my newfound Chromium skills, I landed more changes into Chromium as an Edge PM at Microsoft than I had landed as a Chrome SWE at Google. lol. After four years on Edge, I moved to the Defender team, where I’ve been a PM, GPM, SWE, and Architect-in-All-But-Name.
Prior to full-time work, I spent:
- two summers as an Electronics Test technician
- a summer as a Delphi developer
- a summer as an intern webdev at a Federal contractor
- a spring as a webdev intern at The Motley Fool
- two summers interning at Microsoft on the product that would become SharePoint
- two semesters as a Student Consultant for Microsoft at the University of Maryland
I don’t have anything newly profound to share today, but much of what I’ve learned over this quarter-century is summarized in some of the many posts on Career I’ve posted over the last thirteen years. Back in 2015, I gave a talk about what I’d learned in my first fifteen years: you can find the recording and deck of Lucking In on GitHub.
Tempus fugit!