Category Archives: Microsoft

Do you want to spend the rest of your life selling sugared water?

As I have posted several times, we are building some interesting technology on my team (all, well most, to be revealed at PDC).

While we still have a few (but going very, very fast) SDE positions open, we are starting to look for some program managers as well.

What is the program manager? 

There is a more detailed description up on the Microsoft site, but I have two simple answers based on my years of working in this role: 

  • A program manager is a SDE (may not a good one :-)) that loves to talk. 
  • A program manager is someone responsible for shipping the right product.

Program managers on my team are responsible for the general architecture & design of features, writing lots of code that prove out those designs, talking with customers (right product) and “driving” the cadence of the feature team (shipping).

If you are interested in this sort of role in the language and tools space, send your resume to jpinksto@microsoft (the group program manager for the Connected Languages team).

“The Freedom of Leaving Files Behind”

A good first step would be an IDE/Editor that can manage all of the code in a database and allow the programmer to dynamically construct queries to build views and otherwise manipulate the code. The environment could then generate flat files in order to be compatible with current compilers.

http://www.atalasoft.com/cs/blogs/rickm/archive/2008/06/06/why-are-our-programs-still-represented-by-flat-files.aspx

He could be on to something… :-)

In the 1970s it was Smalltalk, this decade it is going to be something else.

What is a Workspace?

In addition to the language and text editor job openings, we have something a little different that we are working on that some folks may be interested in:

http://members.microsoft.com/careers/search/details.aspx?JobID=B672493E-78D8-406B-AF70-DA86901C0844

http://members.microsoft.com/careers/search/details.aspx?JobID=EED9B5B4-9608-4BEA-AC8C-6947E9B9F691

If you are on the Redmond Campus…

If you work for Microsoft in Redmond and would like to learn more about the projects I just posted about, we are having a “information session” from 13:00-14:30 tomorrow.

Don and Chris will be demo’ing some of the magic that we have been working on for the past couple years.

Email me to get the S+.

New Languages & Compilers

Several months ago, I posted about my team looking for language and compiler experts.

It is not very often that you get to be part of a team that is developing a programming language that aspires to be used by every developer on the Microsoft platform.

In addition, it is not very often that you can be part of a team that aspires to radically change the dynamics of building a new language, to the extent that a developer can write their own model-driven language in a straightforward way while getting all the language services (Intellisense, colorization, etc.) for “free”.

I am lucky enough to be on such a team – and if you are interested you could be as well.

We are hiring engineers to work on a language that will directly drive our model-driven platform:

Principal Development Lead
Senior Development Lead
Principal SDEs
SDEs

We are also hiring engineers to work on a “meta-language” and framework to build the above, enable “Emacs.Net” and expand the languages used to drive our model-driven platform:

SDE
Senior SDE
Senior SDE

If the first set of jobs look interesting, please email the development manager for the model-driven language team: Elliot Waingold.

If the second set of jobs look interesting, please email the engineering lead for the compiler framework: Giovanni Della-Libera.

Emacs.Net

Several months ago, I posted about us hiring for a project that I described as Emacs.Net.

This post generated considerable interest.

People seem to really want a lightweight, highly configurable, script enabled editor.

The key scenario that we are going after is a text editing experience that is approachable for both developers and information workers for new modeling languages that target both types of customers jointly.

This project is just at the inception stage right now, so there is an opportunity to have significant impact on its feature set, design and engineering.

People have asked for more information about specific jobs on the project.

They all involve a mixture of design, implementation and test work, and are available at a wide range of experience levels:

Mid-level Development Engineer 
Senior Development Engineer
Very Senior Development Engineer

If you are interested in having an in-depth discussion about these positions, please send email to the engineering manager driving the project:  Anthony Moore.