shahine.com/omar/

1. I have many things to be thankful for. I get paid to do something I love. “How many people get to do what they love and get paid for it? 2%? 5%?” Microsoft has been very good to me, and what that really means is that the people I work with are good to me.
2. The connections you have, the friends you make... your internal network is your most valuable asset.
3. Travel as often as your manager allows. See #2.
4. Force yourself to meet new people, and reconnect with people you haven't spoken to in years.
5. Understand what the company is building. The only way you can do this is by: 1) participating in Distribution Lists that interest you (they act as disconnected coffee house conversations) 2) dogfood products 3) read vision docs and memos (and internal blogs).
6. You can complain all you want about Microsoft and its problems. Finding a way to fix problems is far more interesting.
7. Register for every in person appearance by a MS exec visiting your campus/team etc.
8. Attend all your all-hands meetings.
9. Try not to criticize the efforts of another group in Microsoft, unless you have spent time investigating and living with their technical, business and market challenges, and/or can come up with something better than a glib statement to help Microsoft beat the competition. [quote stolen and modified from Paul Elliott]
10. Your manager is the most important person at Microsoft as far as you are concerned. If your manager rocks, your career will benefit in ways you can't substitute.

Will I write a similar post in another 5 or 10 years? I really hope so.

Starting tomorrow I officially start my new job, I’ll be based out of Redmond working on the Windows Live Social Networking team (which for those of you that don’t know, my family is moving because my wife got a fantastic job in Seattle) but won’t be moving there till she finishes up her training at Stanford this summer.

I’ll miss Northern California, which has been equally good to me.