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Today’s episode features Scott Hunter who is the PM director for the .NET team. We chat about the challenges that come with growing your scope, applying the lessons learned in startups and consulting to large corporations, and his early days working on BBS (bulletin board systems) for fun lead to meeting the people he’d need to know to grow his career.[00:39] Meet Scott Hunter, Director of Program Management for .NET[00:39] What does a director of program management do day to day?[00:39] How did Scott managed his transition to director of all of .NET from his previous role?[00:39] How did Scott get the role? Taking initiative to find the right place.[00:39] Growing scope and managing perceived identities, from ASP.NET to just .NET[00:39] Why team cultures differ and don’t align even when they ship in the same product[00:39] How did Scott learn and build the skills to make these transitions? Practicing integration in early startup days, consulting.[00:39] Most important lesson from previous managers: Don’t surround yourself with people like yourself and building a team with diverse opinions[00:39] Deciding between going with a new project or continuing along on a journey not complete[00:39] Accidentally attending Microsoft’s conference and joining Microsoft[00:39] Moving from dev to PM and learning communication skills[00:39] Becoming a manager and intentionally stopping himself from coding[00:39] How did Scott into computers? Typing programs into the Commodore PET he stole from his dad.[00:39] Scott’s history of working on Wildcat BBS to avoid forklift driving[00:39] Turbo Pascal and hanging at Anders Hejlsberg’s house and serendipity[00:39] Failing his first Microsoft interview, knowing what you want.[00:39]Trust your internal sense of when to act fast#MicrosoftCareers #CareersBehindTheCode #Director #ProgramMangement

This month's episode features Stephen Toub, a Partner Architect on the .NET team focused on performance and building great libraries.   The libraries that Stephen stewards are at the base of your .NET application.   In this episode, Stephen shares what he's learned about how to be a successful remote worker, what he learned from his brief sojourn in management, and how having been a PM and a technical assistant gave him insights to further his career.  #careers #software #dotnet 0:00 meet the other Steve1:15 Toub's role and being a perf guy4:49 Toub's start in consulting9:25 technical writing and communication skills as a key skill for devs14:55 becoming a program manager and breadth17:54 picking roles that are closest to the core mission18:50 learning he shouldn't be a manager25:05 moving to full time dev28:00 becoming a technical assistant for an executive31:30 navigating reorgs and jumping into open source and cross platform .NET33:21 big company skills, networking, and self-promotion38:15 working remotely successfully and open source42:00 mentors44:00 learning perf

In this month's episode, Steve Carroll, the director of development for the .NET team, interviews Scott Hanselman the Community Program Manager Lead for the .NET team about his career. Scott is a big believer in using the power of empathy and in this conversation he uses that power across the various skills necessary to be a successful programmer and program manager.[00:00] - Scott's role at MS[02:30] - Scott career overview -[05:25] - Finishing his degree while working while teaching[08:26] - Learning to be a consultant and what a CTO does[11:00] - meeting the early dot net team and coming on board[12:00] - the "warm" intro - the transitive property of friendship and opening doors for others[14:35] - being non-denominational in tech religions and strong fundamentals of scale[16:20] - knowing one layer deeper in the stack than your neighbors and sharing knowledge[18:00] - learning uncool tech, what's in common across stacks, and appreciating the history of [computer science[22:40] - difference between a mentor and a sponsor and finding one, being intentional[25:03] - being shown the ropes by a CTO sponsor, learning to navigate the room[26:43] - learning to navigate one layer down from his non-technical parents[29:10] - learning how to be a PM - building extreme empathy[31:53] - how did Scott learn to do empathy? Moving across worlds and practice[35:45] - Learning to do technical communication well -[37:17] - Using comedy, comedy as empathy, the value of improv[40:17]- "rubber duck" programming[42:31] - being the person who admits they don't know, helping junior people in meetings by asking their questions[45:14] - Scott's most valuable career advice - "don't waste your keystrokes"

For this month's episode we have Maoni Stephens, the owner for the .NET GC.   She's a deep domain expert in garbage collection for over 15 years and has a lot of interesting learnings to share about building a career towards the architect path.   We discuss everything from getting the most out of of mentors, building learning into a career, the critical skill of debugging others' code, developing confidence and perseverance towards her goals.[01:37] - Maoni's path to find her GC passion[04:20] - Trying out the PM path with GC[05:15] - What it means to be a GC architect and working with customers[08:40] - Building out tooling to automate her job[14:55] - Most recent career learning - working with a team instead of one-woman army[17:39] - How did Maoni know she had found her area and finding a critical mentor?[22:41] - How did she decide that she needed a change in her job and put her plan into action?[24:51] - Learning to debug as career accelerator[29:00] - On persistence and confidence[32:33] - Finding computers after college[34:20] - IRC as key career maker in the 90's, AGAIN![35:25] - Getting the most out of a great mentor[39:20] - Mentors for non-technical areas, learning soft skills, influence without authority[41:10] - Instilling new habits of interactions

Join Amanda Silver, our first PM guest to learn more about how she accelerated her career with customer understanding and how she harnesses a sense of mission to stay motivated to achieve more. [01:08] - Amanda's roles through the years[03:45] - modern PM - driving culture and anthropology[05:06] - bringing customer into the product[07:07] - career pivot - searching for opportunities with cloud developer[10:50] - figuring out how to bring the entire team to become more customer focused[13:30] - figuring out how to empower her teams[15:30] - PM'ing for Chakra and Typescript - serendipity[19:50] - Moving from specialist to generalist[22:40] - What drives her career?  Finding motivation in career and making the world better through developers[25:08] - Amplifying devs[26:52] - How did she get started?  Amanda's "nerd family"[28:37] - finding CS[29:53] - why PM and academics vs industry vs startups[35:15] - best career advice : mission and purpose

In this episode, we talk to Miguel de Icaza, Distinguished Engineer about his career building open source software, founding companies, and building communities.[01:10] - What Miguel does at Microsoft[04:15] - Miguel's origins in Open Source during college[08:00] - The Birth of GNOME[10:30] - The Birth of Mono[12:45] - Unity and Mono[14:38] - Forming Xamarin[16:51] - Key Career Inflection -  Laid off from Novell, saving the team[18:45] - Critical lesson from his first company "it's very difficult to make money selling Open Source software"[19:42] - Deciding when to take VC money[23:50] - How Miguel learned to run a business[26:09] - Key Learning: Learning creativity from "The Art of Possibility" by Benjamin Zander and Rosamund Stone Zander[29:00] - On Miguel's plan to undermine Microsoft :)[29:54] - Building a spreadsheet teaches Miguel how to take on bigger challenges[33:00] - Miguel's coaches, partners, and mentors[34:00] - Miguel on networking and building community and the power of IRC[39:34] - Worst career advice[40:00] - Productivity hacks

In this episode, David Fowler, the Partner Architect for the ASP.NET team walks you through landing his first job, moving from a dev to an architect role and what he had to learn and let go of at every step along the path.  (David intros himself as a Principal Architect but his promotion was announced right after we filmed.)[00:15] - intros and what's an architect?[03:55] - a quick overview of contributions from his "minion days" on WebForms[06:38] - origins of NuGet[10:28] - signalR and important forks in the road[17:05] - discovering the impact of signalR[17:37] - filling the knowledge gaps - learning to scale up[21:12] - regrets in signalR - lessons learned[23:33] - moving to architect for ASP.NET Core[28:40] - when David knew he was an Architect[30:35] - the importance of having the right manager[32:35] - how did he land at Microsoft? planning ahead during college[36:52] - meeting Bill Gates[38:30] - all the way back - David's first computer[40:48] - all about Barbados and Rihanna[45:24] - mentors and the importance of learning to debug[47:11] - best career advice from Scott Guthrie[48:00] - on networking[48:48] - David's productivity hacks - work life balance - personal backlogs[50:45] - coping with the ambiguity of architect role and sense of accomplishments