Tuesday, March 29, 2011

Blog Post: Meet Dave ? Director, Program Management for GFS

   

I grew up on a small family farm in bucolic Vermont.  My first interest in computers surfaced around 5th grade, when friends’ parents started buying the Commodore 64. We played a lot of Jumpman and “programmed” in LOGO.   In high school I was a bit of a math geek, and took some Basic and Pascal classes as an adjunct to Math.  I remember my teacher making us repeat every day “Computers are stupid dumb idiotic machines with no intelligence whatsoever.  They only do what you tell them to do.”

 

Through a temp agency, I landed my first job at Microsoft as a contractor, doing high-volume photo retouching (on a Mac) for Microsoft’s multimedia CD-ROM reference titles (Bookshelf & Encarta). I later joined the simmering Seattle tech-startup scene. After 18 months of that, I was back at Microsoft as a full-time employee. 

 

My first gig at Microsoft was working in the MSN division on a product called Sidewalk.com.  After that incredible 4 or 5 years, I became more of a “knower” than a “learner” in that system, and decided I needed a change. I had worked with the “Technical Operations” team occasionally whenever there were client-impacting outages of sales systems, and I had enjoyed the technical nature of those interactions, so I applied for a role as a Program Manager building tools to support the Datacenter teams.  This was my point of entry to what was once MSN Operations, but which is now Microsoft’s Global Foundation Services (GFS). 

 

Wow, that was 7 years ago!  I have not run out of stuff to learn, and the scope and complexity of our challenges and opportunities really does seem to double every year. As both the business & infrastructure that supports it, have grown by orders of magnitude, I have never had exactly the same job any two years in a row. I have tackled one problem after another, focused on sorting it out – by optimizing or reconfiguring  teams, processes or the tooling solutions that support them -  and then moving on to the next one. I remain energized by the opportunity to understand and simplify complex systems so they can efficiently and effectively scale. I am surrounded by incredibly bright individuals from a diverse set of backgrounds and experiences who share unbridled passion for achievement. My coworkers motivate and inspire me every day to drive improvements in myself and my work, and together we maintain a fanatical focus not just on our competition, but primarily on our customers’ experience with our services as the “highest order bit” in our system.  

 

Lots of folks move around the company – I have effectively spent 15 years in just one division of Microsoft, and never run out of work that reinforces and amplifies my passion for the industry, the business, the operations, and our customers. 

 

Given this history, I can’t imagine ever running out of new, interesting, hugely impactful, and seriously fun “work” to do at Microsoft with amazing people in a collaborative environment trying to change the world by delivering software and services that have the potential to impact the lives of hundreds of millions of people … and so I can’t imagine working anywhere else..

 

I am David and that’s my story… so far. Check out jobs with GFS here. 

 

 

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