Granted the departments I worked at were sent off to India but I was basically triaging and routing tech support calls. What impressed me about the people I worked with was how underemployed they were. We had folks with masters degrees in math who were solid programmers, solid sysadmins, etc. in the team as FTE's, and people who worked there with similar credentials as temps tended to get good jobs at Microsoft elsewhere, but if you took an FTE position in that department you had a really hard time getting into something better.
In fact there was only one way to do it: get a job somewhere else, and then apply back. Things were so bad at one point that HR was actually recommending this as a career path.
I would certainly agree that the path from product support to any of the product development arms is not an easy one internally, particularly for an FTE role where it is generally expected that you would have a CS degree. Especially after the move to eliminate the software test engineer position in favor of software design engineer in test, which basically eliminated the career path for people who were solid developers or sysadmins but didn't also have a good theoretical CS background.
The temp positions are much more lax in almost all groups. The individual with budgetary authority has nearly complete control over the vendor choice and individual hires, so long as they don't do anything unethical. So, if you can sell to that person that you are qualified, smart, and motivated, they will probably give you a chance. It's typically only a 6-11 month commitment, anyway, and so many of the contractors are checked out that anybody with a spark of enthusiasm really shines in the interview process.
Maybe this explains why so many of the great open source software engineers I have worked with used to also work at Microsoft's Product Support Services ;-)
Comments
Granted the departments I worked at were sent off to India but I was basically triaging and routing tech support calls. What impressed me about the people I worked with was how underemployed they were. We had folks with masters degrees in math who were solid programmers, solid sysadmins, etc. in the team as FTE's, and people who worked there with similar credentials as temps tended to get good jobs at Microsoft elsewhere, but if you took an FTE position in that department you had a really hard time getting into something better.
In fact there was only one way to do it: get a job somewhere else, and then apply back. Things were so bad at one point that HR was actually recommending this as a career path.
I would certainly agree that the path from product support to any of the product development arms is not an easy one internally, particularly for an FTE role where it is generally expected that you would have a CS degree. Especially after the move to eliminate the software test engineer position in favor of software design engineer in test, which basically eliminated the career path for people who were solid developers or sysadmins but didn't also have a good theoretical CS background.
The temp positions are much more lax in almost all groups. The individual with budgetary authority has nearly complete control over the vendor choice and individual hires, so long as they don't do anything unethical. So, if you can sell to that person that you are qualified, smart, and motivated, they will probably give you a chance. It's typically only a 6-11 month commitment, anyway, and so many of the contractors are checked out that anybody with a spark of enthusiasm really shines in the interview process.
Maybe this explains why so many of the great open source software engineers I have worked with used to also work at Microsoft's Product Support Services ;-)