Geek in question: Prashanthi Chitre aka Shanthi

Job title: Program Manager, Desktop Management Services

 How long have you worked for Microsoft?
I've been with the company for eight years, and just started in a new position two weeks ago! I've been in the products groups (UCG) the whole time, as an SDET for seven years, and now as a program manager. I feel a lot of job security at Microsoft. You can move around and still keep your job. I'm on my third job in eight years, but I've stayed at Microsoft the whole time.

So, in my hunt for Microsoft’s biggest Bollywood fan, a ton of people mentioned you. Why might that be?
I was so surprised! I guess my dance work is popular with Indians at Microsoft, and so even if they don't know my face, they must know my name.

I come from South India, Hyderabad, where Microsoft has their big India development office. I'm a dancer, choreographer and a dance teacher. I teach Indian classical dance to kids, and since moving to Seattle I’ve choreographed several Bollywood dance ballets.

I run a dance group called Dreams and we’ve done two dance ballets so far, both adapting western stories into Bollywood song and dance. One was based on Cinderella, and one based on My Fair Lady -- where we twisted the theme from English language to Bollywood dance. Now I'm focusing on my third ballet, which is due in November.

We did all of our dance ballets in partnership with Cry, which is a non-profit organization that raises money to help underprivileged children in India. We raised over $14,000 for Cry with My Fair Lady!

Does Microsoft support your nonprofit work?
Microsoft matches volunteer time spent with nonprofit organizations, so we're trying to set it up so that the time we work on Cry-related shows, Microsoft will match our time with a donation.

Ok, I have to ask. Do you have any movie recommendations?
Jab We Met is my favorite new movie. It's so cute! My all-time favorite is Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge.

Yay! I love Shahrukh Khan!
As far as composers, I like A.R. Rehman's music a lot -- he combines the modern instruments with the Indian traditional music. The music sounds awesome, and I love choreographing to his songs.

I also have a couple favorite dancers. Madhuri Dixit -- she looks just beautiful, and is an amazing graceful dancer. She's got lovely moves. I also love Shahid Kapoor -- he dances with precision and style. I pick at least one or two songs from his movies in my shows every year. And then there's this guy, very famous, Hritik Roshan. He's got great dancing style.

Do you apply your choreography skills to your program management? Or your program manager skills to your choreography?
I have a computer science background, and definitely started in the technology field as an SDET. In my work with dance and my volunteer dance troupe, I wanted to make sure everybody was happy. Developing those people skills with my dance troupe was why I decided to try the program manager role!

Both dance and software require focusing on the end product, without getting distracted. And both are very focused on relationships. I’m glad for my computer science background -- I can always apply those technical skills. But people skills are so valuable for both dance and program management.

Let’s shake it with some links:

• Dreams, Shanthi's dance group
• All about “My Fair Lady: A Bollywood Ballerina”
• Cry, the charity Shanthi works with

The geek in question: Sara Spalding

The job title: Sr. Director of Microsoft's campus in Cambridge, MA

What are you working on right now?
I'm working on making Cambridge a first class center of innovation for Microsoft.

That’s all? …Slacker. ;)
I think about how to help groups from Redmond build development teams here to take advantage of the local talent pool. I’m working to make sure that we have a great presence in the local community. I make sure all our teams here can be really successful, and I also oversee the renovation of our space and amenities for the campus.

Yeah, definitely a slacker. What were you doing before this?
I've been at Microsoft for 15 years, although I had a two year "vacation" that I came back from last November. I spent most of my career in Redmond, as an evangelist and then a Product Unit Manager. I had a blog and gave lots of presentations and did lots of work with our developer community.

Hmm, that sounds vaguely familiar…
Yes – I was Sara Williams! I got married and changed my name. New name, different coast, same person. In the spring of 2005, my husband and I decided we wanted to move East, and so I left Microsoft to move. I worked for Macromedia, Adobe, and O’Reilly Media, and took some time off. Last summer I was contacted about helping to make the Cambridge office a successful development center for Microsoft ... so I rejoined and here I am.

So you left the company to move to Boston, and then Microsoft followed you?
HA! It's ironic because I left the company because there wasn't a compelling job for me here in Boston, and now a big part of my job is creating a lot of compelling jobs for people in Boston. I love it here.

How do you think the greater Boston area will influence the culture at this office, as opposed to the campus in Redmond?
We're very intentional in building a culture here. I think of it as, like, the love child of Microsoft culture and Cambridge culture. We want to take all the drive and excitement and passion of Microsoft culture and put a local flavor on it.

The fact that we have Kendall Square right here (the core of technology in this area!) is going to be a big part of our culture. On the first floor, we're going to have a public meeting space so that we can invite the community in for lectures or user group meetings. We want to be able to host those things here, because we're in this very tight knit, small area that has such a strong focus on technology.

So, you’re super busy … but I understand that, like me, you have a unique work schedule.
I have a one year old daughter at home and I want to be able to spend time with her. So I work part time -- I'm in the office Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday, and then I check email on Mondays and Fridays the way most people do on the weekend.

Yay for permanent/part time employees! How do you get everything done in such limited time?
I don’t. There are two basic processes I use to get close. First, I work with my manager (who is great, by the way) to make sure that we’re on the same page about the scope of my work and my priorities. This is important for everyone, but super important for anyone with flexible working arrangements. Second, I try really really hard to prioritize and make sure that I’m getting the most important stuff done first. It’s not a complete or perfect solution, but it’s mine.

Links!
• Boston Globe article about MSFT Cambridge • Search for part time jobs at Microsoft • Search for jobs at Microsoft in Massachusetts • Sara on Facebook

Last week I attended BlogHer Business in New York City, and appeared on a panel alongside two other Microsoft bloggers, Ani Babaian and Sara Ford. Sara let me pepper her with questions for a couple minutes about the work she's doing with CodePlex, Microsoft's open source project hosting site.

The Geek in question: Sara Ford

The job title: Program Manager, CodePlex.com

Obviously, open source + Microsoft = touchy subject with a lot of history. I'm curious how you approach that. Do you put on your special kid gloves before work every day?
We want to create a site that provides a great user experience for open source development on the Microsoft platform. We want people to be able to collaborate in an online world by giving them project management tools and a source code repository. And, they can track bugs, features, and have discussion boards -- all the things that you need for an open, collaborative environment.

When I'm engaging with the open source community, I say, "Hey, I was hired at Microsoft straight out of college -- I've only seen how proprietary software is built, so I'm curious about how open source projects work. Come and show me how it works."

You use words like "open" and "collaborative" -- words that haven't traditionally been in the Microsoft vernacular. How have you seen the culture at the company change, to where "open" and "collaborative" are now a part of your job?
When I was in college, I would find bugs while coding in Visual J++, and the only way to get assistance was to pay $250 to report the bug. If Microsoft confirmed your bug, your money would be reimbursed.

That was my experience — very closed. Pay Microsoft $250 in the hopes that your bug was valid and you could get your money back?! $250 was the same as my rent! No way I could do that.

After I was hired on in Fall 2001, I started to see a shift, with the company moving towards community and transparency and blogging efforts. I got to see teams starting to use newsgroups to respond to customer questions.

Then the Microsoft forums came around, and blogging gained in popularity, so it was a natural transition. Not only were we encouraged to engage with the community, but we had all these new ways to do so. It's taken a while, right? We're talking like five years ago, but now we have 5500 bloggers, and forums, and we have community.

What lessons do you feel Microsoft has to learn from the open source community?
One of the things that I like about open source is the agile development style. Not everyone chooses agile development of course, but agile allows a really quick turn-around for customers — and since the open source community is so much about collaboration over code, and with agile you can move really quickly.

What do you feel like YOU have to learn from the open source community?
I went to this incredible presentation at the O'Reilly Open Source Convention in 2006 by James Howison from Syracuse University, who spoke about how open source communities succeed or fail. It was like being handed a textbook: "Here's your job. Now go do it." When I came back to Redmond a week later, I had gathered seven call-to-actions of how we were going to change our development model for the Power Toys for Visual Studio on CodePlex.

I actually just submitted a paper for the O'Reilly Open Source convention 2008, and it got accepted. It's called "Towards a Stronger Open Source Ecosystem," and it's a summary of the lessons that I've learned, plus ideas about what the future of open source might look like if there were no barriers in communication. Wish me luck.

Oh, so you want some relevant links, hmmm?

• CodePlex
• Sara's blog
• CodePlex Team blog
• Lessons Learned Going Open Source with the Power Toys
• James Howison
• Power Toys for Visual Studio

Talking about transparency, transgender health care coverage, and ushering out the era of table-pounding Microsoft managers with General Manager Megan Wallent, formerly known as Michael Wallent.

What are you working on right now?
Right now I'm the general manager of an unnamed group.

…Ha! Pure Microsoft!
My group is the conglomeration of a bunch of different things including Power Shell, Server Management UI, the over-all Server UI models, plus a bunch of other infrastructure pieces, plus Softgrid. So, we don't really have an all-up name for it, but the pseudo-name is WinMan.

We work in the space of server and manageability, and I'm also the business owner for MDOP, the classically named Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack. And I'm also the owner of the Softgrid Work, which came from the acquisition of Softricity out of Cambridge, Massachusetts.

You've written a lot on your blog about how culturally supportive Microsoft has been during your transgender transition — I'm curious about whether your transition was financially supported by your Microsoft benefits package.
Microsoft is one of the few companies that has a transgender heathcare program. Granted, there is a $10,000 lifetime cap on transgender healthcare — which may seem like a lot, really isn't considering what's involved in transitioning.

Quite honestly, I don't want to be "Transgender Microsoft Executive Megan Wallent."

Before transitioning, you have to go to a mental health professional to sort through all this crazy stuff, and Microsoft will pay for it. For a whole bunch of complicated reasons, I decided to not ask Microsoft to pay for that for me, but they would have. When you go to your doctor, if they use the appropriate diagnosis code, that's also covered by Microsoft's transgender health care plan. They also pay for all the medications I need to take.

The other thing that gets complicated is that what they will pay for is mostly bottom surgery. Turns out that for FTM [female-to-male] transgendered folks, bottom surgery is kinda not the thing. And even increasingly for MTF [male-to-female] transpeople, bottom surgery isn't necessarily for everybody. I didn't have it. I have no plans to have it. I've been very public about that. I had facial surgery, and that's not something that benefits would cover.

Right, because that's more elective ... ish?
It raises interesting issues of what's elective. Is it elective to pass? It brings up this fundamental question: if you believe that Gender Identity Disorder is a medical issue, and you want cure people of that, what is that? Is it all about bottom surgery? I'm going to say no. Gender identity isn't about your parts, it's about how you present yourself to the world. I've had this conversation with senior folks in HR, and they get it.

Is being a female executive at Microsoft different from being a male executive -- especially given the tech industry's gender culture?
I don't know that I'm the best person to ask about that. I think that, just as issues of race and class often get confused, I think the issues of gender and presentation tend to get conflated.

From a Microsoft executive view, it's more about personality type. It's more about hard driving type-A personality as compared to the quiet leaders who can build coalitions in the background. That's not really gender-related, that's more just management style.

In the 11-plus years I've been here, I've seen the style of leadership change dramatically from the table-pounder to a very different style. The company has changed a lot.

I also have a hard time saying, "Oh, where's my membership card for the female executive club?" People have invited me to go to Women's Leadership Counsel things, and I'm like "Eek, do I really belong there?" I don't want to intrude, or say "Oh, I've had the same experiences as you and I deserve to be there now."

That's an interesting issue -- that's part of what's great about being a woman working at Microsoft is all the great educational and networking opportunities organized specifically for women.
I'm very reluctant to intrude. It's really complicated.

The transparency you've shown on your personal blog is remarkable not just in terms of your honesty about your transition, but just in terms of your transparency as a Microsoft executive. I'm thinking here of your post about the recent leadership conference in Palm Springs. How have your decisions about sharing this very personal situation been influenced by Microsoft's increasing efforts towards corporate transparency?
It's definitely related. I receive a lot of emails from readers of my blog and 'Softies around the country saying, "Wow, this is so brave." I always say thank you, but I don't particularly feel brave, because the degree of transparency that I've come to is almost required.

I'm not anonymous. This is a visible transition to go through. I lead a big team before, I'm leading the same big team after. I had a choice when I decided to come out. I could have said "This is what I'm doing, but I'm not going to talk about it. Suck it up." But if you do that, you give the power to the people outside yourself, because you no longer own the message.

Right: the conversation is going to happen regardless, and you give it away.
Exactly. So if you say, "This is what's going on, I will answer any question you have. No secrets. Bring it." There's no whisper campaign because people can just ask.

In any hard situation, you have to own it. Because if you don't, the result will be far worse than any initial backlash that you may fear.

This has been a big life lesson for me: in any hard situation, you have to own it. You have to be honest about it. You have to face up to it. Because if you don't, the result will be far worse than any initial backlash that you may fear.

Quite honestly, I don't want to be "Transgender Microsoft Executive Megan Wallent." But the way I'm going to get beyond that is answering people's questions and letting them process it. Then we can move on.

More about Megan on the web:
• Megan’s blog • Megan on ABC's Nightline • Valleywag's coverage of Megan's transition

It took a proposal from Steve Ballmer to entice a promising computer science student to consider a career at Microsoft. Now she’d like to see more women and minorities follow her lead.

By Fred Albert

March 3, 2008

Miya McClain was 18 years old when Steve Ballmer made her an offer she couldn’t refuse.The college freshman was at a Seattle hotel demonstrating an internship project for a gathering of high-tech executives when Ballmer stepped up to the dais. After delivering his keynote address, he stood before the crowd and offered McClain an internship at Microsoft.

“I wasn’t going to apply for the Microsoft college internship,” confided McClain, now 24 and a software design engineer in test for Office. “I was just going to intern at other, smaller companies like I had in high school.” But when the CEO of Microsoft offers you a position in front of a room full of industry hotshots, how can you say no? Representatives from other companies swooped in to counter Ballmer’s offer, but it was too late. The die was cast.

It was a heady experience for McClain. As both a woman and an African American, she is a rarity in computer science. But for those who know her, the development was hardly surprising.

McClain was just 14 years old when she hooked up with the Technology Access Foundation, a nonprofit organization in Seattle that prepares children of color for higher education and careers in computer science. “We put her to work the first day, and she just took to it,” recalled Trish Millines Dziko, a former Microsoft employee who serves as TAF’s executive director. “Each day she just got better and more curious. She just had it.”

McClain had harbored an interest in technology for years. “I was always interested in gadgets and electronic stuff,” she said. But as a youngster who was home-schooled most of her life, McClain hadn’t had much exposure to people who worked in high-tech—and certainly not women or people of color in the industry. That all changed when she met Dziko, who is also African American. “Sometimes, in order to see yourself in a position, you have to see someone like you doing the same thing,” McClain said.

She remained in the TAF program throughout high school, picking up skills in HTML and JavaScript, then interning each summer with a small technology company.

“When I went to college, I was ready to go into computer science,” McClain said. With the help of a scholarship from Blacks at Microsoft, she entered Mills College in Oakland, California. But even then, she hadn’t pictured herself actually working at Microsoft. “I always thought I’d be at some small startup. That’s what I had done in high school, so that’s what I knew.” But Ballmer’s offer changed all that. She spent the next three summers interning in Redmond, and became a full-time employee after graduating from Mills in 2006.

McClain rarely turns down an offer to speak about her work—especially to young people. “I want people to see that you can be young, you can be black and a woman, and still be in a technology field,” she said. “There are still times I go into a room at Microsoft and I’m the only woman there, and the only black person. But if I can let people know that…you can survive in this world and do well, then other people might see that they can do it, too.”

McClain says that most of the black people she meets at Microsoft work in the business or marketing end of the company. She’d like to see Microsoft pursue black technology students more aggressively. She also thinks school systems could do a better job informing children of color about opportunities in the field. “A lot of people are trying to start in high school, but I think it’s something that [should] begin in elementary school,” McClain said.

Dziko agrees. “The assumption is that kids of color can only do certain things, and then it perpetuates itself all the way through college—for those who actually go.”

McClain was pleased to find that the same variety of experiences she enjoyed at small firms were available to her at Microsoft—all within a single company. “Working at Microsoft is just a great opportunity for me,” she said. “It’s just meant endless boundaries. I can go as far as I want. I really like that about the job.”

Megan Wallent (formerly known as Michael Wallent, General Manager with IE) is back on the job this week.

It's been absolutely fascinating to read about her transition on her blog ... and it sounds like things are going smoothly now that she's back in the office!

A Microsoft PM tracks her story from aspiring astronaut to apprentice to SDET to PM to UX student The geek in question Dana Badeen

The job title Program Manager, Engineering Innovation (Windows Server)

So, Dana. What did you want to be when you grew up?
When I started college at the University of Michigan, I wanted to be an astronaut. After two years in the Aerospace program I realized that the chances of actually getting into the Astronaut program are worse than getting struck by lightning! And even if you get into the program, you only have a one-third chance of making it to space.

So I looked for something new. I considered going into art, but I couldn't really justify starting all over with my degree. At that point, I was two years into Engineering, so I figured I'd just finish up with more of a business-focused engineering degree — Industrial and Operations Engineering.

How'd you get into testing and program management without a CS degree?
While applying for Michigan's Math PhD program, I randomly heard about Microsoft's Test Apprentice Program and applied for that on a whim. I came out for an interview, and got an offer the next day.

The Apprenticeship program is nine months long — you work half the time with a team, and then half the time you have classes taught by professors hired by Microsoft. Nobody in my apprenticeship group had a Computer Science background. We'd all dabbled — I was really good at MATLAB and there was a guy who was really good at Fortran — but none of us had direct experience. There were a lot of us with math and biology backgrounds, and some physics. From what I've heard, last year there were a couple of English majors in the program!

And what are you doing now?
At the end of the Apprenticeship program, I shifted into being full time on my team in an SDET role within Windows Server. A year and a half later I became a PM. My team focuses on the overall quality of Windows Server by pushing quality standards into the OS itself and into applications (MS and non-MS) that run on it. Kind of a whole ecosystem approach. I work a lot on the Server app logo programs and recently took on heading up application compatibility on WS08. I'm also the liaison between Server test teams and WinSE (Windows Sustainability). Oh, and I own a testing tool that lives in WTT (Windows Test Technologies) called Scenario Builder and host a monthly test talk series for Server teams.

Ok, so aspiring astronaut to SDET to PM. Whew! What's next?
Now that I've found myself a responsible career, I'm going back and pursuing my other passion, which is art. I'm really interested in how people interact with products, so I'm actually going back to school for a visual communications degree. Microsoft is paying for a chunk of my tuition — I've been talking to UX designers here, and would like to switch into that role. I have a good background for UX work — if you've work with a product and understand the code behind it, it's going to be easier to understand the face of it.

I'm trying to still pull 40 hours at work — I work from 8 until 2, go to class, and then power up my laptop at a café around 5pm to finish up a couple hours. The flexibility is great.

Feeling clicky? Have I got links for you.
Microsoft Test Apprentice Program Innovate on Windows Server (Dana's team site) PM at Microsoft post from JobsBlog Windows Server Test Talks (Microsoft internal page)

Yay for the lolcat costume!