It was more than 18 months that I moved to the Technical Computing organization inside Microsoft. I had joined a startup team that worked on building a platform for large-scale compute and data processing on top of Azure. It was an amazing experience. We worked hard, produce great results, and learnt a lot. I met great people along the process. Even though there isn’t a specific product to which I can point as outcome of our effort, our learnings/ideas are now distributed throughout Microsoft and are gradually finding their way into other products.
I stayed with Technical Computing to help with a new product in the modeling space. I was responsible for the design of the Azure-hosted service of the product. Given that the team is executing great, I decided that it was time to move on.
I talked with many teams, inside and outside Microsoft. I met some great people along the way. It was a very educating experience which lasted around 2-3 months. I considered joining startups, moving to other larger companies, and even starting my own.* There were times of stress of not finding something interesting and times of being overwhelmed from the amazing offers I got. At the end, I decided that money was not the primary motivation for me. I chose to decline good offers in favor of joining a group of people next to whom I can learn a lot.
I am joining the team that David Campbell and Erik Meijer have started putting together. Their aspiration is to build something new and exciting in the data management and processing space (not necessarily relational :-). I’m humbled to be joining a team of really smart and talented folks. I am going to be responsible for one of the major areas of work and will be leading a team.
It’s an exciting opportunity and I can’t wait to start talking about all the things that we will be doing. The team wants to execute fast and release often so stay tuned.
I am very thankful to all the people with whom I talked throughout my search. They opened doors of opportunities for me and trusted me with their offers. I’d like to believe that I made some new friends!
* In fact, I did start a small company for fun and I plan to continue working on a couple of ideas when I have free time.
2 responses to “New challenge”
Hi Savas! Sounds like you’ll be working on some really interesting stuff. I’ll shoot you an email soon because I’d like your advice on the various teams in Microsoft and where the really interesting work is. I’m starting the job search and given the huge number of listings Microsoft has I’d like to narrow it down a bit. Good luck in the new position!
Savas, great news! I’m sure you made the right choice. Ping me when you’re ready so we can discuss collaborations 🙂