The SDE career path at Microsoft
In Microsoft, there are a number of standard job titles. The most important one is SDE – Software Development Engineer. The rest can be considered the supporting cast (one requirement of being an SDE is to be so supremely confident that such a statement as the previous one can be made without actually laughing out loud while doing so). The life of an SDE at Microsoft is as close to heaven as a computer geek can get. Chocolate donuts for breakfast, a quick bite in the cafeteria for lunch, any fast food at all for dinner, and before, in between and after is glorious coding. Of course, other things intervene occasionally – like annoying testers who keep insisting the code actually works, or program managers who insist the code actually be useful to someone (honestly, I don’t know where they find these people), or bosses who insist on “talking”, sometimes even in the form of meetings. These are unfortunately necessary evils and an SDE will tolerate them and, on occasion, even indulge them from time to time. There is a cloud on the horizon in many SDE’s careers however, and it’s called management. At Microsoft, there aren’t a whole lot of real managers, they are mostly technical people who at one time or another did real work and then – probably due to chemical imbalances in the brain brought on by a diet of donuts, cafeteria and fast food – suddenly “stepped up” to the management plate. It’s pretty insidious. One day you’re a happy go lucky developer enjoying work to its legal limit and with masses of extremely marketable skills, and then your boss suggests that maybe you should take on a report or two. Just junior people, you understand, to see how you like it. Zap. Six months later you have a team of 15 and you can’t write a line of code to save your life anymore (but you can create a mean Powerpoint presentation). Microsoft does have an alternative career path for SDE’s (and the other, lesser, disciplines) which enables an IC (individual contributor) to remain an IC but continue to progress in that role. While the ultimate destination of a manager is a VP, the equivalent IC role for an SDE is a DE (Distinguished Engineer). DE is quite a bit harder to attain then VP, actually. An intermediate IC role is usually some kind of architect. I know some people who have followed this path successfully, but it is a bit of a harder road to hoe. In my case, I’ve taken the Bilbo Baggins approach (“There and Back Again”). Prior to 1998, I had spent 13 years as an IC (not all at Microsoft, although I wish I had joined the company in ’85). I then took on two reports. Then six. Then, after Exchange 2000 shipped, I took on a team of fifteen. Then suddenly I had seventy developers working for me. I even attained the exalted level of PUM (Product Unit Manager). Those were the dark times. I forgot how to code. I forgot how to debug. I pretty much forgot how to think. I finally snapped out of it and ever since I’ve been striving once more for IC status. I currently am down to a team of five, but I’m not likely to get much lower than that any time soon. No matter. I’m coding again and once more feel like a contributing member of the team rather than a roadblock on the way to success. And those chocolate donuts are yummy. - Jon AvnerExchange Team blog got an upgrade!
We are excited to announce that Exchange Team blog got an upgrade! We wanted to enrich the experience of visiting our blog site, as well as wanted to improve the site design and add several features to the site. Firstly, you will notice that we are now hosted at the different URL, and our new home is at: http://msexchangeteam.com/ The new "main" RSS 2.0 feed link is: http://msexchangeteam.com/rss.aspx Then, you will notice that the whole site got a visual overhaul, hopefully it is more pleasing to view. Hope you like it! Few other things that are brand new: - The Videos section of the blog. Here we will be placing different videos that we will be recording occasionally - things like short interviews with members of Exchange product group, demos of something cool in Exchange and so on. Who knows, some Exchange party video might make it up there too! - The ability to add attachments to blog posts; no more posting of scripts in the body of the post (which can cause formatting and syntax issues later). All of the "old" links RSS links and feeds should keep on working (so the redirection is in place from old http://blogs.technet.com/exchange to new http://msexchangeteam.com/. We plan to keep this redirection in place for a good while, but just to make sure - you might want to update your RSS clients to point to the new URL so you can keep on getting your dose of Exchange-related goodness without any interruptions in the future! As always, feedback is welcome. Look out for more new features and improvements we are planning! - Exchange Team Blog crewWhy is OOF an OOF and not an OOO?
Here's an interesting historical question - when we say Out of Office, why does it sometimes get shortened to ‘OOF’? Shouldn’t it be ‘OOO’? Inside Microsoft, ‘OOF’ means not just the message which says you’re Out of Office, but it has grown to mean the act of being Out of the Office too - so you’ll get people putting sticky notes on their door saying ‘OOF Thurs & Fri’ or even people verbally saying things like, "Oh, Kevin’s OOF on vacation for the rest of the week’. I suppose that sounds better than "Oh, Kevin’s OOO on vacation ..." OOF was a command used in the days of Microsoft’s Xenix mail system, which set a user as ‘Out of Facility’ - ie Out of the Office. The usage of the term ‘OOF’ just stuck, as did the term ‘Little r’ (e.g. on an email sent to a distribution list, "Who wants to go to the cinema tonight? Little ‘r’ if you’re interested", meaning reply just to me) - as preserved in Outlook with CTRL+R for Reply, and CTRL+SHIFT+R (aka Big R) for Reply All. Ewan DaltonOutlook REST API beta and Outlook REST API v2.0 Deprecation Notice
Today we are announcing the deprecation of the Outlook REST API beta and Outlook REST API v2.0 and that they will be decommissioned on November 30, 2022. Once past this date, the services will be retired, and developers may no longer access them.How does your Exchange garden grow?
One question we often get asked when talking to customers contemplating an Exchange upgrade or a switch from a competitor’s mail system is, "how many users per server can Exchange handle?" Nowadays, that’s an open question - it very much depends on what kind of users you have, what kind of storage you’re using and how powerful your servers are. When Exchange 4.0 was released in 1996, a decent server might have had 256Mb of RAM and a 90MHz Pentium processor, with maybe a handful of GBs of SCSI disk in the box and possibly a DAT tape drive. Users’ mailboxes might have been in the 10-20Mb size range, and the average user sent or received only a small amount of email per day. At that time, server sizing was pretty much a function of how much computing horsepower you could afford - the CPU power, disk size & speed and memory capacity available (along with the all-important user profile) would determine the number of users per server, and arbitrary decisions would be made about maximum message sizes, mailbox size etc. Now, it’s possible to buy even mid-range servers that will cope with many thousands of users, and the bottleneck has moved down to the storage level in many instances as user mailboxes have grown in size and we send and receive far more mail, and many larger messages too. We’d be interested in hearing anecdotes about particularly unusual messaging environments you might have - how large do your servers grow? What’s the biggest mailbox you’ve ever seen (assuming you’re not restricting with quotas)? How much data does your total Exchange system manage? What’s the biggest single database - etc, etc... you get the picture. Some factoids to get you started... if you have anything along these lines, please post a comment: - One customer (who is part of the Exchange Technology Adoption Program) sets no limit on message sizes internally - and one time saw a single message with attachments totaling 2.4Gb in size! (which Exchange delivered! - the recipient’s mailbox quota was instantly blown apart though...) - The largest single Exchange 5.5 Public Folder Information Store I’ve come across was 800Gb in size - There’s a limit of 1,000 Exchange 2000/2003 servers in an org - has anyone come close, or hit that limit? - One customer deploys around 250,000 Exchange users per server and has over 9,000,000 users in total (you guessed it, they’re an ISP) - The most heavy user of public folders in the world (that we know about) has about 1,500,000 public folders containing around 8Tb of data So come on: let’s hear your war stories - post a comment with your amazing data :) - Ewan DaltonMicrosoft Ignite 2020 - One Week Away!
In about a week from today Microsoft Ignite 2020 gets underway. It’s quite a bit different this year but the one thing you can be certain of is we have lots of new and interesting content for you to enjoy. This post is to highlight the Exchange, Outlook and Bookings sessions we have created and curated for your viewing pleasure. The links won’t be live until the event starts, but we wanted to give you a peek into what to expect.Exchange and SameSite Updates
The Stable release of the Google Chrome web browser scheduled for release beginning February 17, 2020 features a change in how cookies are handled. Microsoft is committed to addressing this change in behavior in its products and services before the February 4, 2020 rollout date to ensure our customers are minimally impacted.Exchange "12" has a new name!
With Beta 2 approaching, Exchange "12" needed a name. I know the suspense has been killing everyone. Well the wait is finally over: Exchange Server 2007 If you keep hearing the team talk about "E12" , "12", or "Exchange 12" - please understand - it's all the same thing. It just takes a while for us to adjust. Thanks! - Terry Myerson
