Getting Hired as a Writer at Microsoft
It seems that there are not a lot of writers with programming experience who are looking for a position in a big company. But there are jobs available--a search on the Microsoft career site for the job title "programming writer" returns 24 results as of August 15, 2006. My team has been looking to hire a programmer/writer for a number of months. To give you an idea of what the position (and interview process) calls for, I intervewed my manager Christa Carpentiere to find out what she's looking for in a writer.
I also talk a bit about the desirability of working for a corporation versus being self-employed, but only from the perspective of what I've read--I've always had company jobs. Do any of you readers have personal experience you could share about this?
This podcast is 8.5 MB in size, and is 12 minutes, 6 seconds long.
https://media.libsyn.com/media/harrymiller/HMB2006-08-11_Hiring.mp3
Comments
Anonymous
August 15, 2006
A full-time employee needs to be the kind of person who wants to stay for years within a group, participate in long-term planning, provide leadership and continuity across multiple releases or products, and accept some degree of politics / personalities. Ain't me.Anonymous
June 03, 2007
Hi Harry, Great topics. Could you give some idea as to what the interview for a lead tech writer involves? Are the questions related more to tools and technologies, or on planning and overall approach to projects?Anonymous
June 04, 2007
It depends a lot on the group you're interviewing with, and also the specific job. For example, the group I'm with has programmer writers, because we write code examples with the developer docs. So during the interview loop we have someone from the product team check for knowledge of programming technology (especially Visual Studio) and also code-writing ability. When I interview writers, I usually give them some object and ask them to sketch out a documentation plan--I'm checking to see how they plan the scope, and whether they consider background information and also task-oriented topics. What usually trips people up is that they don't ask questions, even though I tell them they can ask me anything about the object. The managers definitely ask about planning, and like to get lots of details about steps in the process--things that show real experience. I don't think I've ever heard a question about tech writing tools, but I always hear questions about the technology to be documented (or similar technology that you could transfer knowledge from).Anonymous
June 04, 2007
Excellent. Thank you.