You just joined Microsoft…what enticed you to come here?

I was working as a Manager of an Information Security Engineering team at American Airlines at the time my son Austin was born. I realized a year after I went back to work that I needed to find a job that met my desire to spend time with my family and have a set schedule where I didn’t need to be available 24/7. I had several offers but decided to join Microsoft after seeing the technical challenges that I would be able to enjoy every day along with the fantastic benefits. I believe that if you can get passionate about what you do, it makes all the difference going back to work after having a child and I was able to fulfill my passion at Microsoft while at the same time, meet my personal family needs.

What benefits were attractive to you?

The healthcare benefits at Microsoft are just phenomenal. When you come from another company and see the difference, you can really appreciate the comfort that comes with having such great medical coverage. When something medically goes wrong, like we had when my son was born, you can focus on that issue not whether you have coverage or the costs you will have to pay.

What is your role like?

I am on what is known as the Critical Situation (crit-sit) team for Sharepoint. Most of the time, I come in every day and work with any company that has a high priority SharePoint issue. We take the case on and attempt to solve their problem in the most expedited manner. While most problems are resolved in a few hours, some more complicated issues can take a few days or weeks to resolve. Given that we work in shifts, I can hand off the work to shared teams around the world to continue working on the issue so I can go home to be with my family. Unlike what most people believe, I am not on the phone all day long because I am in support. I sometimes talk with a customer via phone or online chats, but mostly I am on the backend doing trouble shooting and research offline.

What do you need to be successful in your role?

You need the ability to troubleshoot yourself outside a paper bag. By that I mean reach into your skill set and pull out nuggets of information that enable you to advance the case. And when your skill set (paper bag) doesn’t contain the answer, you have to reach beyond it to identify the right resources and learn more information until you can identify an answer. In that way, you grow your own skill set. I am often looking to previous cases, internal only information, reviewing source code, doing online searches, or setting up my own SharePoint farm to try to recreate the problem by adjusting settings to match the customer's environment. Anything to get to the root of the customer issue.

Anything surprise you since you joined Microsoft?

How good they are as a company and how much they appreciate the employees here. Microsoft rewards their people incredibly well which is even more obvious when you come from another company. It’s shown in small things - from bringing lunch in to support a team, birthday celebrations, field days, internal rewards for great customer service, appreciation for yearly anniversaries - so many things are done to ensure the employees feel appreciated.

My Career Progression

IT Consulting with Arthur Andersen, Security Engineering with American Airlines

My Areas of Technical Expertise

IT Security, Active Directory, SharePoint