A summary of my short stint of a year at Microsoft as a SDE and my experience from back in college to the last day of work!

Some Context on Me

Hi. I am Kushal. I was not someone who always dreamt of pursuing CS as a career. I was not what you would call a goal-oriented human and to be honest, I still am not. Coming from a relatively small city and an average school, I was not aware of what “The Internet” was! Back in school I did not have opportunities like others in my college did. Like every other student in my school, Computer was the subject that just existed, it was science that everyone had a liking for. I still remember in 12th grade I had a special liking for Mathematics and pursuing it were my initial thoughts. After going through the typical JEE process, it was time to choose a college and more than that a field. Took some advice, saw my rank :) and looking back I consider it nothing less than a miracle that unknowingly I got into IIIT-H, a place where I actually liked what I was learning and building. I would say I was an above-average for a student(weird flex but ok) and I probably spent most of my time on the Basketball court, but yeah I liked what I was doing. I explored a lot of fields, did a bit of academic research and like every other college student went through the BT of internships and placements. There is a lot of drama in college life, but that is for some other time, for now all we need to know is I started with Microsoft thanks to my college placements.

The Placement process - My Interview experiences

With the placement season coming up, I was a bit worried because the “CP kinda coding”. It is not something that I enjoy, I was average at it, learnt from whatever was taught in courses. Had done a bit of it during my internship days and gave some contests here and there. But yeah I was not great at it. But I was not tense. Usually I am not tense. Before what they call “The Placement Season”, I had an off campus interview scheduled with google in January so there was a backup at the back of my mind. But call it fate, it got converted to an on campus interview. Google was the first company to come on campus. The interviews started at around 12 AM and the first interview went average, I was surprised I got a second one, which I thought I aced but that is when I got rejected :D And then started a chain of rejections. One of the primary reasons was obviously coding. The questions were too tough, with some whose complexities itself were even hard to digest and I still wonder what was the point of such questions. I remember I got shortlisted for almost every company I sat for and after a string of rejections came Microsoft! Microsoft is known for standard coding rounds and a fair bit of structure in the interview process. In all fairness, for personal reasons it was one of the companies I surely did not want to join! But call it fate :P I did not do great in the coding round to start with and did not expect to get shortlisted. But thanks to good academic record and not so strict screening criteria I got shortlisted for physical rounds. I was a bit skeptical initially on whether I wanted to “Tank” the interview(considering I had worked with Kafka and was in the waiting list of confluent), but then I got some good advice and decided to give the interviews with due diligence. Tbh it was a very smooth journey for me personally, with not so much pressure from the interviewers themselves. The first was a written coding round which was quite basic in all honesty. Also being more concentrated on what I was interested in, they went quite well for me. Two more rounds into the interview process I was told I was selected. It was not just a sigh of relief but also a quick realization that it had not been a week but was just two days of “The Placement Season”!

The Beginning

Fast forward 6 months from the placement day, I had a job. I felt I was a grown man only to realize later on I was not xD I was told you will be working with SNow Data Analytics team and was introduced to my manager. I was set to report to him on 13th of july (2020). It was the first day, I set up my system, talked to my manager and he briefed me a bit about what the team does. Trust me I have never felt so dumb in my life and I usually don’t feel dumb. Obv Rajesh(My manager) was there saying that it is normal and it takes time to understand things, but I was used to building systems over a week in college and this was a whole new playing field itself. There was a lingo that was different, a tech stack which was different and there was so much complexity.

Rajesh had a very systematic plan in place, which he called a 30-60-90 day plan. He left it up to me on what I wanted to learn, but the idea was to learn a lot and gradually shift into work. I obviously had tremendous support from Deepak, Ravi and Swetha (my teammates) in explaining the silliest things to me. I remember disturbing them for the silliest things and probably hats-off to them for dealing with me peacefully. I still remember I used to ask them a few things again and again (because my memory duh!) and their response was always calm, with a note : Try documenting things. I remember I took my first three months in a very chill manner, just learning at a slow pace, which left my parents to wonder : Why does this kid get paid :P

The “Actual” Beginning

I had already started working on a few things in my first 3 months itself, but now it was time to take responsibility and make mistakes. 3 months into my job, now I was given equal (although limited and easier) work as my colleagues. I still remember messing up the PROD Database a few times and learning the importance of why DEV exists. I remember initially how tough it was to attend early morning meetings. Then I started taking responsibility as a DRI/on-call, which meant I was responsible for complete system health and bugs/issues for that period of time and now when I look back it was a smooth(although tough), thanks to the 3 months of learning that I had.

Apart from work, I really liked how Microsoft respects work-life balance. I still remember having some work pending and was planning to work on weekend, when my team lead said that I should not work on weekends, it is okay to delay it to Monday(even though it was low key important). The ideology was simple and full of respect. Although having less experience, I never felt that my views were not being respected. Apart from that, there were a lot of perks and bonuses which made me feel appreciated. I think I can go to the lengths of saying that there is no company out there which cares so much about their employees and showers them with so many perks. They make you feel a part of the company’s success :D

Added Responsibilities

So around a quarter from onboarding, one of my teammates Swetha was supposed to go on maternity leave. Initially as a team we were wondering if we could take all the work planned for the quarter. Our team used to do Co-Development (Co-Dev) with the Data Quality Service’s team (DQS), which Swetha used to look into majorly and I had a very brief idea of it’s working. Along with that we were planning to onboard our customers to Data Lake Solution and retire SQL. So there were a lot of efforts that were going to go into it. That is when the team made a collective decision that I would take over the co-dev work with DQS and contribute a bit to the decommissioning and onboarding customers to the new solution process.

I think there was a phase of a few days, when I was clueless once again on how DQS as well as Data Lake(EDL) worked. But I was lucky. DQS and EDL both used python/spark. I had used it before so I felt a bit more in the comfort zone. I started with DQS and implemented the required feature’s mainframe in a very short period of time. There were bugs and silly issues, but iteratively they got solved. It sounds quite simple right now but it was a long tiring process and took almost a month to get rid of all bugs. It was around that time that we started onboarding our customers to EDL. But that was the easy part. There were a lot of discrepancies in data in our three solutions : SQL, Kusto and EDL. The actual Data was there on the ServiceNow platform which we pulled using APIs. Not that it was not expected, but it was the scale that left us surprised. I remember I was usually tasked with comparing the counts and the data. I wrote some complicated python scripts to generate even more complicated KQL queries to make the whole process simple. All in all it helped me a lot, since it was lightning fast. I remember the long nights and it was tiring. Luckily I did not have to deal with our customers a lot, but we were on strict deadlines. Also it is hard to deboard when people usually don’t check mail :P I also remember we came across bugs which were there in the system for months now.

The Chaos and the Peace

We initially solved the configuration bugs only to realize there were more. Now here was the issue : The data we are dealing with here is not small, it is like a million rows and hundreds of attributes. Also, it was too close to the deadline and we had dependency on the EDL team. So a few more late nights and after a lot of chaos, we were on the verge of completion. I had not worked on such a huge scale before, so that feeling for me was fulfilling. I think those 3 weeks would have been the toughest ones for me in my one year at microsoft.

In all this work, I forgot that I had to deal with DQS too. I started testing our resources with the updated features and… it failed. There was not just one but a string of errors. Here was the issue : There was not much time left till the deadline, onboarding resources was a ton of manual work and the DQS team was based in the US. So it was hard to have long interactions. I still remember having calls at around 3AM and debugging the issues with them. It was a lot of fun, laughing at us missing silly points, but the mornings felt hard. Surprisingly so deep into my career at Microsoft, the support and the motivation was ample. I did not even realize how time flew by and how we were done with two quarters and met our deliverables.

This is when two big changes took place : Firstly our team was getting more autonomous, we were going to take more responsibilities which later transitioned to taking a completely new work itself and secondly I got a great opportunity to pursue Research as a career at google. Those who know me know that research was something I looked at as my next career step, but did not realize it would come so early. Little did I know that it meant my days at Microsoft were almost over. Since Google was a competing company I was not supposed to work for 45 days. I kind of wanted to work, but seeing that it was just brainstorming we had to do, my manager was of the thought that it was going to be fine and it was not required. So I had 45 days of a paid vacation in my luck and obviously there was COVID and obviously I was not productive but it felt like a much needed break.

My Takeaway

So here I stand after first week of my new job, thinking how fun my journey actually was. I learnt to appreciate others and tbh learnt a lot about working professionally. The technological aspect just seems a small part of the big picture now. I felt great the way I was appreciated and supported back in Microsoft, even though I was bidding farewell. The experience was nothing I expected to be, with the added fun part that my team had never seen me physically. Being as childish as I am, I liked how Microsoft gives gifts almost every quarter and on a serious note I loved how structured things were. I did miss interacting with humans outside my team, probably because of me being a bit of an introvert and the whole setup being virtual, but all in all it was a ßfun year I spent <3