I love working for Microsoft because I am constantly around amazingly smart people that creates endless learning possibilities. There are so many challenges and problems to solve in this company that I walk away everyday having grown in one way or another. Whether it is learning a new process, figuring out a new way to solve a problem, or having to just tough it out from the sheer amount of work stretches and grows me. The growth I am experiencing is the most exciting thing about working at Microsoft. Specifically, I am on the Ads International team within the AdsRnD group. The Ads group creates many products that provides a mechanism for advertisers to advertise on both Microsoft products and 3rd party websites such as Bing.com, MSN.com, Wall Street Journal, etc. The AdsRnD group also provides a solution for publishers to monetize their website by displaying relevant ads provided by Microsoft. My immediate team provides each product group support around internationalization so the products that are created can be utilized in different countries. This involves localization of files so different languages can be displayed, globalization that allows the platform to handle international characters and various locale differences, and marketization that allows for customization depending on what market the product is utilized in. Knowing that the product I work on is extremely important and strategic to Microsoft makes this group an exciting place to be. With the Yahoo! alliance, the international growth the AdsRnD team will be experiencing will be tremendous. We will be going from supporting 1 language and 5 markets (not including EN-US) to supporting dozens of languages and markets. My team will be accountable for a large portion of this work. Having problems and obstacles to overcome in this crucial time period makes coming to work rewarding. For example, one recent problem my group solved was finalizing on a plan to localize over 600,000 words into Ads’ first DBCS language, creating the localization infrastructure to enable this, creating a test plan that decouples the testing away from the product team that will provide more time for testing, and making all this work to sim ship a DBCS language in a 6 week release cycle. Now, that is exciting!
