The Microsoft Careers website has a section entitled Meet Our People where various profiles of employees of various divisions at Microsoft are highlighted. For whatever reason, I was one of the people picked this year and you can go there find my employee profile here.

The process was quite lightweight. I spoke to an interviewer on the phone for several minutes and then she sent me a transcript of key parts of our conversation which I got to edit or veto. After that there was the photo shoot and a couple of weeks later, voila.

Reading the profile, there is some stuff that stands out to me. I've already been here 3 years so I'm no longer a new guy yet I still don't feel like part of the B0rg. There is also the point about management being interested in your career and you as a person.

• A while ago Mike Torres and I had a presentation for Brian Arbogast which was my first presentation for anyone with Vice President in their job title. While setting up my laptop, Brian chatted with Mike about a post he'd read in Mike's blog about wanting to upgrade his home sound system. Brian also mentioned that he'd remembered seeing my name come up in a lengthy internal email thread where I was in a debate with Vic Gundotra and didn't back down, he commended me for sticking to my guns. That was cool.

• After a recent all-hands meeting I disagreed with parts of the presentations made by David Cole and Steve Liffick, so I sent them some critical feedback. They not only received it well but after exchanging some mail, Steve suggested we meet in person to discuss things further. When I eventually met with Steve, he readily accepted my  feedback so we spent a most of the time talking about Social Software as the Platform of the Future. That was fun.  

• Our dev manager, Farookh Mohammed is just as interested as I am in making sure we have something akin to an MSN Developer Network when we start shipping our APIs for accessing MSN Spaces and we'll be working together to evangelize some ideas around this topic to upper management.

• My boss's boss knows I'm fairly good at communicating my ideas in writing and that I'm passionate about social software so he's been encouraging me to produce a whitepaper that can be shared with various folks around work. 

• My boss, Mike Pacholec, has told me I need to attend more conferences and has suggested that I should plan to attend at least one more conference before the end of the year.  

At the end of the profile it states that I have my dream job which is true. I get to work on software that I like using and which directly affects millions of users. All of this in a ship cycle that is measured in months instead of years. What's not to love?