By Zoe Goldring

Are you all hip to the stories being told on the Microsoft News Center (MNC)? This is a great place to check out the latest official information from our company. Typically the articles posted here are fairly company-centric, but earlier this week there was a story talking about Bing's social search team on our Silicon Valley Campus. The reason I thought this was particularly interesting was rather then just talking about the product, they talked to the engineers behind the technology and got to know them a little bit. With all of the amazing things that come out of our company it's sometimes easy to forget that it all starts with incredible people. It's nice to get a chance to find out what it's like to work on a specific team or to know who's who. And I think you all are starting to get to know that I love to tell stories about the people behind the products!

You can read the whole piece here, but here are a few excerpts I liked the most:

MNC: How do you feel about working at Bing, and about the search engine’s place in the market?

Yiu: Outside Microsoft, in the Silicon Valley, people talk about Microsoft as “The Terminator” – it just keeps coming back and coming back and coming back. We have a sense of commitment to success that’s not as common in other companies. It takes guts. We’re not number one but we have commitment – and crazy good engineers.

Harrington: We’re still building our system and it’s really awesome. It feels like a startup – it’s an exciting place to be.

MNC: How did you find your way to search?
 
Suchter: I was kind of bummed out when I graduated and was looking for jobs. I thought, “Man, I missed out on all of the interesting things in computing.” I wasn’t doing stuff in the 60s when the fundamentals of computer hardware were invented, and I missed out on the 70s when they figured out core operating systems, and in the 80s they invented databases and everyone figured out how to build stuff with that really exciting building block, and then in the 90s as the Internet happened, I thought, “Huh. All the interesting problems are all done.” I didn’t realize how much I lucked out finding search. I see it as the defining field for the next many years that is changing the way people can interact with computers.

Harrington: I was really attracted to Web search because it represents a frontier in software engineering that is just now being explored. Having cool engineering problems to solve using computers is my dream.

MNC: Do you ever wish you had a super power?

Yiu: Super empathy. I just finished reading this book called, “Getting More.” It’s about getting more not just for myself but for other people. One of the main ways to get more is to put yourself in someone else’s shoes.

Harrington: I was going to say something like flying, but man – now I have to think of something smarter.

I can't help but get a plug in for some of the hot jobs in this location! We are hiring for our offices in Silicon Valley. Check out a few of the job postings below to get a taste of the positions that are available. You can also create your own search by entering in Mountain View, CA in the location search field on our career site to pull up all jobs at this site.