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Freedo & his space

Career advice - from executive speech (2)

Look a big picture
Always look at the big picture.
If the product you are working on, think about every scenario, situation that when I call the work with IE 4 or IE 7, whatever it was, just think about what are the customer respective , what are the customers going to say.

Think too much about title & pay

And this one is, a little interesting to talk about in China.
I totally realized that especially titles mean a lot in China. This is really from my own experience, when I don’t worry what my title is, they are a lead or a manager or whatever, the right things just happen. Because what really happens is that, “how I going to get a senior dev lead “ instead of focusing that, I actually focus on how can I get my work done.

So, really it’s a focus issue.

The more you just focus on doing the right job, having the right passion, that’s what in the case weather you going to make ready for the next title, promotion. To me, the very key thing to be successful, when I first came to Microsoft, I’ve gone through so many different titles, jobs, I’ve gone from been a manager to a lead, to have 100, 5, 150 people reporting to me, to me actually it doesn’t matter, to me, what matters is what is the impact that I can have on the company on the customer, on the products.

Training

Training is very important to people and I totally get that, I know that a lot times, when I speak to the people in university, one of the most frequently asked question is , what’s the training like in Microsoft, and I have been in Motorola worked for another company and, to me that : there are 2 different approaches:

One of the approaches I guess it’s like IBM approaches, You started at IBM, you going to take training of a month or about. Probably what your retain from training is 10 percent.
Your brain can’t take so much at once.
And here in Microsoft , it is really incredible, the amount of training available and it’s very impressive. Other than these trainings here, you are not going to go through like a month of training, it really makes a lot of standards to let’s say:

I don’t know how to program in C#, tomorrow my boss comes and says, hey, I need you to use C# to write this feature. Ok, now you can take the training in C#.

Taking the training just in time, I’m using it now and I’m actually going to be very efficient on that.

And so, make sure that you do take time to do training, it’s very easy to get to the point when you very busy, always enough work to keep you busy, but make sure take time to keep up with outside technology trend.

To make you are able to make the decisions, maybe your manger might come and say you should go like this, to write this function in C#, well, maybe it should be done in C++, maybe should be done in something else. You know, if you don’t know about what else are out there, you can’t really make those decisions.

tags: career life career advice

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