Pivotal Moments with John Lam

Links to sections (with timestamps)Larry's been here for 37 years 10 months ... or has he? 01:53Carnegie Mellon in the 1980s: 03:04Interviewing for a small 500 person startup in Seattle: 06:01Meeting Steve Ballmer, "Head of HR": 08:23Interviewing with Gordon Letwin: 10:50Flying to Paris to fix a floppy drive bug in MS DOS 4.0: 13:33Burgermaster for lunch and naming objects in MS DOS: 16:58Documenting the creation of Windows NT: Greg Zachary and Helen Custer: 19:35On the importance of lunch conversations in driving the culture of a team: 23:30It's Alive! Windows NT running Reversi on an i860 emulator: 28:04Thursday Beers, MAPI Beers and the Weekly World News: 30:08Rewriting the Beep() API in Windows Vista to save tens of millions of dollars: 34:22Larry's brief tenur in Microsoft Research: 43:14The legendary Exchange Server "Stonehenge Party": 49:03Scalability Day and Microsoft's beginnings as an enterprise software company: 55:26How Larry's biggest feature in Windows 7 kept killing gamers in-game: 01:04:44The origins of the Windows Runtime team in Windows 8: 01:07:09The origin story of the IUnknown.com domain name: 01:11:26How Larry enabled language projections in WinRT using COM: 01:12:34From Windows to Azure: Confidential Compute and encrypted VMs: 01:20:13On joining DevDiv and the Azure SDK team and becoming "mini-Jeff": 01:27;17What advice would you give someone just starting their career at Microsoft? 01:32:28Something that gave Larry an outsized amount of joy recently: 01:37:21External LinksLarry's GlowforgeLarry's ornate box, cut on the GlowforgeThe Goupil G4 with the showstopper floppy drive bugGordon LetwinShowstopper by G. Pascal ZacharyInside Windows NT by Helen CusterPC Roadkill by Michael HymanMusic credits––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––Track: Lost In Medina — Amine Maxwell [Audio Library Release]Music provided by Audio Library PlusWatch: https://youtu.be/qNSdpqSkRe4Free Download / Stream: https://alplus.io/lost-medina––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––

Table of ContentsHow the Customer Driven Playbook influenced how Sid thinks about PM (14:34)How Sid prepared for his informational interview with our team (15:49)The importance of preparing for your informational interview (17:23)How we structure our PM interviews in DevDiv (19:40)Imposter syndrome and what we can do about it (24:05)On rubrics and career progression (28:54)Side-hustle entrepreneurial thinking while working at a big company (34:20)Learning about customers via jobs-to-be-done and customer interviews (41:52)The lack of respect that PMs face when working with some engineering teams (46:24)On the importance of autonomy and agency in the PM role (55:52)Building products is a team sport (57:00)Travel bidets, cultural barriers and friction in experiences (1:00:36)TranscriptLink to the full text transcript (with audio player!)LinksThe Customer Driven PlaybookThe Jobs-To-Be-Done frameworkThe Hypothesis Progression Framework for Customer Development** Some of the above links are affiliate links for which I earn a commission from the vendor if you purchase a product.

This week, I'm talking with Dustin Campbell, a Principal Software Development Engineer who's been working on tooling at Microsoft for nearly 15 years. He's worked in Visual Basic.NET, the Roslyn C# compiler, the C# extension for Visual Studio Code, and the WinForms designer in the latest release of .NET Core. He has an undergraduate degree in jazz performance guitar, which naturally led him to building spam tools for his father, then to a software sweatshop in Las Vegas before finally landing at Microsoft.Along the way, I learned what distinguishes compiler engineers from other species of software engineers, whether there is any hope for paring down the concept count to empower non-professional software developers, and why immutable synax trees are awesome. Links from the show-

This week, I'm talking with Jeffrey Mew who's been working on quite a few projects on my team at Microsoft for nearly 3 years. Jeffrey's a graduate of the unique co-op program at the University of Waterloo in Canada, where he interned with us before making the decision to come on as a full time employee.Today, we talk about what makes the co-op program at Waterloo unique, and why Microsoft values so highly the graduates of this program. In fact, at one point a few years back when we hit "peak Waterloo", we had 5 Waterloo graduates on our team! We talk about how PM is really an inter-disciplinary career and what you might be able to do to help prepare for this during school.Along the way, Jeffrey shares with me how he gained valuable experiences in each of the three major projects that he's done at Microsoft: launching Jupyter Notebooks in VS Code, partnering with Facebook on PyTorch tooling, and building a brand new data wrangling experience in VS Code.Links from the show:University of Waterloo Co-OpJupyter Notebooks in VS CodePyTorch in VS CodeData Wrangler is coming soon :)

Link to full text transcriptTim Urban's Life Path PictureTim Urban's Primitive Mind and Higher MindDaniel Pink's The Power of RegretIvey Business ReviewInstagram - Guan's ArtBret Victor Inventing on PrincipleYouTube - GawxYouTube - Frank Tedesco's OMEGLE playlistSharon's TikTokMusic credit:––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––Track: Lost In Medina — Amine Maxwell [Audio Library Release]Music provided by Audio Library PlusWatch: https://youtu.be/qNSdpqSkRe4Free Download / Stream: https://alplus.io/lost-medina––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––

Link to the full text transcriptMusic credit:––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––Track: Lost In Medina — Amine Maxwell [Audio Library Release]Music provided by Audio Library PlusWatch: https://youtu.be/qNSdpqSkRe4Free Download / Stream: https://alplus.io/lost-medina––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––

Link to the full text transcriptDog Company: The Boys of Pointe du Hoc -- the Rangers Who Accomplished D-Day's Toughest Mission and Led the Way across EuropeUpstream: The Quest to Solve Problems Before They HappenMusic credit:––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––Track: Lost In Medina — Amine Maxwell [Audio Library Release]Music provided by Audio Library PlusWatch: https://youtu.be/qNSdpqSkRe4Free Download / Stream: https://alplus.io/lost-medina––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––

This was a fun conversation about many things, including:Explaining what a Program Manager in Developer Division does to three different audiences: his kids, a new college grad, and an industry veteranWhy he thinks he gets more mileage in his day job out of his English major than his Computer Science majorHow someone can spend three years working on memcpyWhat working with large partners like Windows, Azure, and Office really entails and how to be effective in that roleWhy he really wanted to come to the Pacific Northwest 18 years ago and why he decided to stayWhat it was like listening to customer feedback in the early days of the Visual Basic .NET teamWhat we should have built instead of LightswitchHow his super power of not taking being yelled at personally contributed to his career successThe balance and joy that he gets from living near Puget Sound and his fishing kayakWhy the Azure CLI needed to be rewrittenTranscriptLinks:Visual Studio LightswitchFishing KayakAzure CLIMicrosoft Open Tech

Austin recently joined the PROSE (Program Synthesis) team in Developer Division from the University of Tennessee where he was an Assistant Professor in the Computer Science department.In this conversation, Austin and I discuss such topics as:His recently discovered love of LEGO as an adultHow bouldering helps him strengthen his problem solving skillsThe differences and similarities between working as a professor and as a Program Manager at MicrosoftThe effectiveness of using a 'flipped classroom' teaching techniqueHow Visual Studio and Visual Basic 6 got him started in programmingHow to use feedback loops in recommendation systems to generate superior resultsWhat we can do to improve tools for software developers by better understanding what their intentions areShow transcriptSome links from the show:What a $500,000 grant proposal looks like - Austin Z. Henley (austinhenley.com)Nintendo Entertainment System LEGO setThe Design of Everyday ThingsScott Fleming (Austin's PhD advisor) - The University of MemphisOpenAI CodexGitHub Copilot · Your AI pair programmer