Sleepless at Seattle

Its justified to have my first post about Seattle related to the main purpose of being here.. Internship at Microsoft... After the internship interview and the offer it was decided that I would be in Redmond between June 1st to August 19th..

The New Employee Orientation marked our first day into Microsoft Corporation... Met new people felt good to be part of one of the biggest companies in the world...

What followed was the ramp up session, setting up my dev box, do an s+ to sync up with other employees and have weekly one on ones with my mentor...
which in a non-Microsoft world would be..
What followed was the initial learning session, setting up my computer, set up and appointment to follow up with other employees and meet my mentor weekly.

My team.. MSN Mobile Services is all about developing services for Mobile applications... The idea is to give a Windows like experience in operating with your mobile phone. However, I also got to work with the client team that makes the mobile phone talk with these services...

The internship as such, is extremely well planned and organised.. The first week in Microsoft, you would have to discuss with your mentor and set up goals for yourself.. 6 weeks into your internship you have the Mid Point Review where you are assessed based on keeping up with your goals' schedule and based on the company values... Improvements, corrections and acheivements are mentioned and the rest of the 6 weeks is planned... If you are performing at a level expected from you, they would discuss about your interview for a Full Time position..
If you choose to interview with your own team, you would have to just meet the recruiter and the manager in your team. If you feel that you want to interview for some other position (and/or) in some other group, you would have to go through the four rounds of interview which is similar to the internship interview... Finally, at the end of 11 weeks you would have to go through the interview and submit a Final Review document after talking with both your mentor and manager. The last week of your internship they would make you an offer for a Full Time position, if the team needs you...

My experience was pretty much the standard path... Had my goals set up.. My main target was the intern fair demo on the 27th of July where I had to demo and end-to-end working prototype of my work.. The learning curve was too steep and had to refer to a lot of code and lot of people to understand and implement what I wanted. With some fixed deadlines and last minute night outs, I was able to successfully demo my work.. There was a Mobile group team meeting on 28th and I had the opportunity to demo my work again and received good appreciation from the entire team.. The rest of the internship was spent in stabilising the service, adding a few more features and bringing my code up to date on the protocol.. I had a decent-to-good reviews... I chose to interview with my team and had a nice talk with the recruiter and my hiring manager...
Their decision ofcourse was to be made on the last day...