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Quote: Career Development @ Microsoft (Prakash Sundaresan)

说明: SQL 的 GM, 也是我的Customer， Prakash 写的一篇关于在微软如何发展自己职业的文章，内部交流的，拿出来share 一下。
不得不说，在微软，总有人让你心悦诚服。

It is mid-year career discussion MYCD time, and for a lot of people here, this might be the first time going through that process. Even for those who have been through the process before, MYCD time usually brings to mind questions regarding how to build a successful career, in general and especially here at Microsoft. While I won’t claim to be an expert in this by any means, I have spent over ten years at Microsoft now in various roles and have learnt a few lessons in the process. Perhaps more importantly, I have had the good fortune of receiving career development advice from some very distinguished people such as Jim Gray, Peter Spiro, Dave Campbell (all Technical Fellows) and Paul Flessner (Sr. VP and leader of the SQL Server team for over a decade) to name a few. So, when Jane asked me to write a blog post for the March edition of the STBC management blog, I thought it might be timely and relevant to spend some time discussing this topic.

Career development is a broad topic, and what kind of career to build and how best to build it depends a lot on who you are, what you want to achieve in your career (and life), what your unique talents and strengths and weaknesses are, etc. Therefore, it would not be possible or appropriate for me to give advice that is specific to any particular circumstance here. What follows below, then, are some general thoughts and perspective that I hope shall be useful to a broad audience. I welcome any and all comments and discussion.

1.Know thyself:

The first thing to keep in mind when thinking about your career is to know yourself – your goals, your passion, your strengths, your weaknesses. Without knowing yourself, it is obviously difficult for you to plan your career, let alone having other people, such as your manager, help you in this regard. This might sound obvious and straightforward, but it is actually not always easy. Figuring out what exactly you want to be can be difficult, especially for people at a very early stage in their careers. . What profession do you want to be in – engineering, research, product marketing, sales, customer support or something else? If you’re an engineer, what discipline(s) do you want to build expertise in – Development, Testing, Program Management, User Experience or Product Planning? Do you want to follow an individual contributor track or the people management track? What kind of technology do you want to work on – consumer or business, platform or applications, hardware or software or service? Do you want to work on a start-up project or on a more established product? For some people, the answers to these questions are very clear – they may be the lucky few! For most of the rest of us, we need to spend some thinking about these. And the answers might change as you grow and accumulate different experiences, as you learn more about yourself and about different career options and their tradeoffs. Each of us shall make up our own minds about these questions, but one thing I want to emphasize – understand what you are passionate about and steer your career so you are working on that. If you’re not passionate about what you’re doing, it is going to be difficult for you to excel at your career, especially next to those who are.

I’ve always believed that one of the big advantages of working at a company as broad as Microsoft is that wherever your passion may lie, whatever the stage of your career, there are opportunities that match those interests. But to take advantage of those opportunities, you first need to understand where your passions lie. To give you a couple of examples from my own career, I started as an SDE and was moving up the SDE management track. After a while however, I realized was growing more interested in what we should build as opposed to how we should build it, so I decided to change to the PM track. A few years later still, I got an MBA and became more interested in the business aspect of things and was considering moving to Product Management. However, at this point, Paul Flessner asked me a very insightful question – “Are you a technology guy with a business interest, or are you a business guy with a technology interest?” I decided I was the former, so I stayed on the Engineering side but took a position running the Strategy PM team for SQL Server, which gave me exactly the business exposure I was looking for.

2.Make a plan – and keep it up-to-date:

I always find it useful to think ahead for the next 1, 3 and 5 years and have a sense of what I want to achieve and where I want to be at each of those points in the future. What skills do I need to acquire, what experiences do I need to accumulate in order to achieve my goals in each of those time-frames? Again, different people are different – some people may plot a series of incremental steps from where they are today to where they want to get to. Others may be more comfortable with bolder leaps entailing significant change.

It is true that life is unpredictable and the most perfect of plans can be laid waste by changing circumstances beyond your control. However, that is not a reason to not have a plan in the first place – in fact, it is precisely because circumstances can change that it is important to have an understanding of where you want to go and how you’re going to get there. That way, when life does present an unexpected twist, you can respond appropriately.

For those in the very early stages of their careers, making a plan can seem daunting. Here’s an idea that might make it easier. Find a mentor, or at least a role model – someone in the organization you can look to and say ‘I want to be like that person’. Go talk to that person, find out how they got to where they are, and see how you can adapt that experience to your own situation.

Once you have a plan, it is also important to keep it up-to-date. Review your plan at least once a year to see if you need to make any major changes – annual review time is a great time for this. A mid-year review to checkpoint where you are is also useful – and MYCD is an ideal time for this.

3.Develop good habits:

I’m sure many of you have read or at least heard about the famous self-help book “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People” by Stephen CoveyI don’t want to recommend any particular habits here, but I do want to make a point about habits themselves. I’ve seen many folks develop damaging habits and thinking “I know this is not a good habit, but when the real opportunity comes, I know I’ll be different”. Wrong. There is an English-language saying – “we’re all creatures of our habits” – meaning who we are and how we respond to a situation is determined to a great extent by the habits we have developed. Whether you are an optimist who believes in solving problems or a pessimist who lets himself be overcome by problems, whether you’re a go-getter who rises to a challenge or one who falls short – this depends to a large extent on what habits you have developed. So don’t sit there waiting for the “right opportunity” to give 110% - do it every single day and you’ll be ready for opportunities, large and small – and in fact opportunities will coming knocking on your door with remarkable regularity.

4.Be an expert - on being an expert:

After getting my Masters degree, I had the tremendous good fortune of spending a year doing an internship at DEC with the one and only Dr. Jim Gray. I learnt so many things in that one year that it was a life-changing experience. But perhaps the most important lesson I learnt from Jim was “to be an expert”. If you’re thinking “an expert in what?” you would not be alone. The answer may surprise you. It doesn’t really matter as much what particular subject matter you become an expert in, what matters more is that you become an expert in becoming an expert. Through your career, you will encounter many situations that will require someone to go learn about a new area, develop a plan on how to tackle that opportunity or challenge, and go execute the plan. If you develop the core and repeatable skill to successfully take on such new challenges, I guarantee you the growth you will go through shall be enormous. As you demonstrate your ability to successfully take on one new challenge after another, you will soon build a reputation for being the “go to person” who can be trusted to take on the hardest, most ill-defined challenges and find a way to be successful. There is no better way to learn than by doing, and knowing how to be an expert will provide you the opportunity to learn by doing in a variety of different situations and challenges.

5.Help your manager and your team:

Ok, now from the general to something very specific. I’ve seen many people who are not clear about how to advance to the next step in their career. They often come to their manager to discuss what they can do to get that next promotion. I’ve always found these conversations somewhat strange. Of course, depending on the circumstances there may be a variety of things that you need to do that would help you advance in your career. However, one consistent way I’ve found that employees can help both themselves as well as their team is to ask a simple question – what does my manager worry about and how can I help him or her? I think this simple thought process, executed in good faith, does remarkable things for aligning your efforts with what your manager and your organization needs the most while at the same time benefitting your career . This is of course easier when what your manager and the team needs is also what fires your interest. However, there will be times what your manager needs may not be what you want to or like to do. If that is the case for the long term, then perhaps you are in the wrong job and you should look for another position that is more aligned with your interests. But there are also times where you should set aside your immediate interests in order to solve an urgent and important problem for the team. I’ll give you an example from my own career. As I mentioned before, I switched track from Development to PM. The first time I tried to do make this change, things did not quite go as planned! I had been talking to Peter Spiro, my manager at the time, about wanting to make this change and he told me to go find a replacement for myself first. So I did, and having handed over the reins of my team to this person, I proudly went to Peter and said “Hey, I’m ready to be a PM now!” “Not so fast” said Peter, “we have a special project we need your help on and I need you to take over as Dev Manager for this project!” Although I was disappointed in the short term, this was clearly the right thing to do for the team, so I took on the Dev Manager role. Eventually, a year later, I did go on to my PM role, but I also learnt an incredible amount in that intervening year. Recognizing such “opportunities” and doing your bit for the team will help you build a reputation as someone who can be trusted to be a “team player”. And in today’s world, while it is important to be individually skilled, it is equally important to know how to make your team and your organization succeed.

6.Drive your career, but don’t be obsessed with it

Finally, let me wrap up by saying what I believe – your beliefs may be different! Most of us spend a majority of our waking lives at work or in work-related activities, much more time in fact than what we spend with our families. No wonder then that work and career are such a major area of focus for most of us. However, it is always useful to keep in mind that there is more to life than just career. Friends, family and community all play an important part in our lives and it is important to have the right balance between your work-life and your personal life. So, while we all have our goals and we work towards them, it is important to take your time and smell the roses along the way. Indeed as someone smarter than I famously said “the journey is the reward”. When it’s all said and done and you arrive at where today you only dream of getting to, what you’ll remember most are the friends you made along the way, the shared struggles and hard work, the disappointments along the way to eventual success. So, savor the experience – it will pass only too quickly.

There you have it – a brief summary of my thoughts on career development - looking forward to some thoughtful comments and discussion.

Prakash

tags: career opportunity sql server

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