The geek in question: Amir Bahadori

The job title: UX Designer II

What are you working on right now?
My team works with Fortune 500 companies to create entertainment experiences that we promote on the MSN homepage. We just did a website for LeBron James from the Cleveland Cavaliers — it was this 3D book that opened up and had articles and content about his life.

Essentially every project is its own universe. We take from our services and create an experience that people can come in and play with and spend some time with the brand, so there's a bit of brand lift.

Ha! You said “brand lift.” So, do you feel like you're part of the design underdog when compared to, say, Apple?
Being a designer at Microsoft — it's a tight-knit group and there's a high bar for quality. There's a real camaraderie that happens. Maybe it’s a black-sheep thing. Luckily, Microsoft encourages all employees to have a voice, so we stay true to the Microsoft ethos by backing up our opinions and making ourselves heard. At the end of the day, it’s our audience and customers who have the last word.

Which Microsoft product designs stand out for you as the crowning glories of the brand?
There’s a lot of great stuff coming out of the online and entertainment divisions. Steve Kaneko's team is doing amazing work — he heads up the UX and Design for Zune.

Zune is a good example of how a great UI and rockin’ brand and brand visuals come together with hardware and software to make a cool, cohesive user-experience. I’ve been converted completely.

That said, Microsoft is a huge company of smart people and so there are lots of little pockets of creativity to be found.

What were you doing before Microsoft — I heard something about farts and explosions?
I'm originally from LA where I studied illustration and new media at the Art Center College of Design. Right after graduation, I got hired to work on South Park: Bigger Longer & Uncut and then went on to spend four and a half years working on the TV show. My official title was just Technical Director, but on my first day at Microsoft, my hiring manager introduced me as a former "Technical Director of Farts & Explosions” and it stuck.

What farts and explosion skills do you apply to your job?
I learned to be slightly critical of what is generally accepted, which is a definition of irreverence and a tenet of innovation. I get free creative reign on the team I work on, which I may or may not get on other teams at the company. Pushing the envelope while being mindful of constraints is the balancing act that makes working here fun...

That said, I DO think there's a place for farts and explosions in Microsoft Office. I think people are ready for that.

How's the cultural transition worked, going from LA to New York ... to Redmond!?
That was the biggest hurdle for me. When I first moved here, I lived in Bellevue for about a year. Coming from NY, it wasn't a good fit for me at all – living near downtown Seattle is a better fit and has some of the urban racket that reminds me of my former home. Five weeks ago my team moved from Redmond to Microsoft's South Lake Union office in Seattle. It feels like starting a new job! And I can literally see my apartment from here.

It’s a pretty different atmosphere too — we have a Whole Foods down the street and a WaMu and Starbucks in the lobby. And I can see the Space Needle out my office window, which is kind of a treat and reminds me that I’m a Seattleite… as if my first pair of Keen sandals didn’t make that abundantly clear.

Links links links!

• List of available jobs at Microsoft's South Lake Union campus: microsoft.com/careers
• Design at Microsoft: microsoft.com/design
• Examples of Amir's work for MSN: syncmymusic.msn.com lifestyle.msn.com/stylestudio/?video=vid008
• Amir's IMDB page: imdb.com/name/nm1006505/

I first met Zune developer Hoop Somuah last summer, after a colleague on the Zune team suggested that he might make a good profile for the ViewMyWorld website. We covered all sorts of topics in his profile, including the ways that the small team felt like a start-up, and the ruffled feathered from a coding retreat that some regarded as a coup. More than six months (and a Zune release) later, I thought I'd catch up with Hoop again to see how things were going.

Hey, Hoop. So, what's changed since we spoke last summer?
Last year was all about building the base for the Zune service. This year, we're working on building cool stuff on top of that infrastructure. Last year we were much more hard pressed for schedule, trying to make the release date for Zune 2.0.

Summer and early fall of 2007 I worked harder than I have ever worked in my life — harder than college, even harder than when I had two jobs simultaneously.

How many hours a week?
It varied. I would work maybe 60, 70 hours one week, and then the next week I would take it easy so that I wouldn't kill myself and get sick. We could have cut features, but everyone was so passionate about what we were trying to build that no one wanted to drop anything.

Did working those super intense hours add to the start-up-esque feel of the team?
Yeah. The point for me last year when it really hit home was when I came in one morning and saw my dev manager wearing the same shirt he'd been wearing the day before. He'd had an idea for some code he wanted to write and he decided to take a crack at it. It was cool to see.

Not everybody pulled all-nighters, of course. There were people who kept 9-to-5 schedules, and were highly effective during the day. That's really hard for me to do — I'd rather pull all-nighters and work weekends because I just can't do the 9-to-5 thing.

But, I really respect the diversity of how people work. The Zune team is really diverse — by any definition of diversity!

Yeah, there are so many ways of looking at diversity — of course there's HR diversity like race and gender, but then there's just lifestyle diversity.
I think our diversity makes us extremely versatile — we're able to overcome some amazing challenges because of it. Sometimes we butt heads but we always come out with new ideas.

Zune has lots of young people, and lots of very experienced people. Some people have kids, some people don't have kids, some people have kids who've grown up and left home. Some people grew up in the states, some people grew up outside the states, some people have lived in the Northwest all their lives.

All these different things factor into how we work — especially with what we're working on, in the music space. The diversity of music is interesting in and of itself, and to see how that affects people on the team? It's pretty cool.

So, you've been at Microsoft for several years. Tell me what you're learning right now.
Right now I'm focused on how people build large scalable systems. We're looking at making Zune into this thing that has millions of people collaborating and sharing music experiences — and we want to figure out how to do that.

Facebook has millions of people visiting their site every single day. How many computers do you need for that? How do you get all the computers to work together? Facebook has figured this problem out. Google has obviously figured this problem out. Amazon has figured this problem out. A lot of teams in Microsoft have figured this problem out.

Working on Zune, I'm starting to think more about this stuff and learn more about different ways to build scalable services.

Oh hey: speaking of Facebook, I noticed that you'd put some of the photos from the View My World photoshoot on your profile. Have these photos assisted you in any of your, say, personal endeavors?
I went back to Stanford for a recruiting trip, and I went to the group that I worked withn when I was there, and my boss had downloaded one of the pictures and had put it on the wall and gotten everybody to sign it. Regarding the impact on my social life… no comment.
[Editor's note: We will take this answer to indicate that Hoop is too much of a gentleman to say whether or not he has gotten dates from his View My World photos on Facebook.]

I'm curious about the self-organized code retreat you took last year with a few coworkers — a coding retreat that was instrumental in designing the Zune 2.0 service. Have you done that again?
We haven't, but there are a lot of interesting ideas bouncing around my team that we've been thinking we should just disappear and dig into a bit more.

It's a great exercise that I think all teams should try. Everybody does retreats here and there, but a brainstorming/"let's prototype something"-type of retreat is a really interesting way to churn out a ridiculous amount of code.

There are always a lot of exciting features being built on the team. Because of this, a small group of folks going “off-the-grid” might ruffle some features if people think they’re being excluded. On the other hand, when done right, it can make the whole team more “agile.”

Any advice for how to pitch a code retreat that might be less feather-ruffling than yours was?
It's easy to come off as, "We're going to go off and do this by ourselves because you guys don't get it." A better way to frame it is, "We go put our heads down and concentrate on this one problem without the distraction of all the other work going on." And so you take the people close to the problem, isolate yourselves from everything else, and go work on it.

Here's a scary question: do you feel like you're defining the future of music with your work on Zune?
The face of the music industry is definitely changing, and we're in this space at a really interesting time. We're trying to figure out how things change from all sorts of angles.

How do we change the way people acquire music? How do we change the financial model of music? Do you pay per song, or do you pay a subscription for as many songs as you want? There are a lot of questions about how that will work. What about distribution? How does this affect the role of music labels? What about how people experience music? What if they didn't have to think about how to acquire it, it's just instantly available? What if you were paying a fee to get music how you want it, when you want it, where you want it?

I'm just along for the ride, really. I want to make it easier for people to just get the music they love, without having to think about it.

Thanks, Hoop! Now, how about some links...

• Hoop's ViewMyWorld profile
• Behind the Scenes video of the ViewMyWorld photo shoot: