A Productive Summer
Andrew Begel and I had a very productive summer. We conducted 95 interviews with 26 people, and spent 7 days onsite observing new remote employees. We'll be presenting a poster titled, "How will you see my greatness if you can't see me?" at CSCW in November. The poster session is Monday night, Nov. 11. Come by to hear more about our study, especially our findings about how excellent work is and is not observable from a distance. Stay tuned; we're submitting longer papers to two other conferences, and I'll post here when they get accepted.
Related links:
Human Interactions in Programming Group at Microsoft Research
ACM's Computer Supported Cooperative Work Conference (CSCW08)
A new vocabulary
I'm lucky to be the kind of researcher I am. I get to observe and interview people who do really cool work and to learn about what they do. A couple years ago I learned how vaccines for Black Plague get made. My dissertation lets me learn about how bridges (real ones, not just metaphorical ones) get built. Now, at Microsoft, I learn how software is built. Over the last couple of weeks I've been interviewing managers of developers and testers at Microsoft in an effort to recruit them for my study on remote onboarding and to learn about what they do.
Years ago, before I came back to grad school, I had the illustrious title "Developer" at a web start up in Chicago with about 100 employees. A "software team" there was a project manager, a developer, an architect, and a designer. We built websites. My job was to write ASP code that made the designers and project managers happy. Towards the end of my career, I wrote ASP.NET code. Somewhat more complicated, still produced a website. "Developer" at Microsoft means something a bit different. Developers at Microsoft build stuff that matters - Windows, for example. They do it in teams using tools such as Source Depot, Razzle, test harnesses, RSOPs, WTT, and TFS. They meet in scrums, war rooms, Live Meetings, Office Communicator, one-on-ones, and code reviews. Those 12 phrases and acronyms are new to me. Not one of them had I ever heard before. I now know what 5 of them mean. I'll leave you to guess which 5 I know.
Learning the vocabulary of my subjects is just one part of my research, but it's been a while since I had so much specialized vocabulary to learn. The phrases and acronyms the engineers I study use seem a bit more intuitive to me, things like "pancake test" and "aggregate" are nearly self-explanatory. Granted, "code review" means about what you think it does but "scrum"? No, developers are not playing rugby.
Being a new employee while studying new employees is so meta I can hardly handle it. Perhaps next week when I meet my first new employee subjects I'll start to feel like I have a better handle on the situation. For now, while I'm meeting with managers, I'll just keep typing as fast as I can and hope that I'll know when to ask for help.
Learning about visas
I'm just starting my third week as an intern at Microsoft Research, and I'm still figuring out how to blog this experience. I'm working in the Human Interactions in Programming group studying remote onboarding of new employees in the Microsoft Canada Development Centre (MCDC).
We originally defined remote onboarding as a process new hires who are geographically separated from their teams go through when joining a new company. After interviewing managers and HR professionals, it makes more sense to think of remote onboarding as a process the organization goes through to help new employees be productive. We use remote instead of distributed because only one person is physically separate from the rest (sometimes called a "one-off"). For me, distributed refers to a group whose members are in a number of different places, either together in groups or apart in one-offs or groups. Basically remote is a subcategory of distributed and a special enough category to get its own name. Microsoft uses a similar term, remote management, to refer to the kind of management leads and other managers must use to work with employees who are far from them, whether at MCDC or in India, Ireland, China, etc.
I'm conducting a comparative case study in order to understand how remote onboarding works and how various interventions impact onboarding experiences. Of course some part of my energy is directed at identifying areas for growth so that Microsoft can improve their onboarding, but it's too early in the study for me to talk about improvements. That said, I think I'm ready to say the U.S. has some serious room for improvement in its visa and immigration rules.
Many people are working from MCDC while they await an H1-B visa. Others are planning to stay in Canada for some time. A third group are waiting for L visas. As I understand it, both H1-B and L visas are work visas; people who hold them are able to work in the U.S. H1-B's are the visas awarded through lotteries that we hear and read about while Congress and the Presidential candidates debate immigration reform. Microsoft has been pretty open about its feelings about immigration laws. They want to hire more foreign workers because they are qualified, but the U.S. won't let them in the country. Enter MCDC. Canada apparently likes the idea of highly-skilled workers with good salaries living within its borders. L visas are internal transfer visas and are not part of a lottery system. Basically, if you work for Microsoft in another country for 365 days, you can then get an internal transfer and L visa to come live in the U.S. and work for Microsoft for 5 years. The H and L visas differ in their rules for getting them, the rights you and your family members have in the U.S., the length of stay, renewal, etc. I'll be learning all about visas in the next couple of months. I'm pretty sure I'll think we need some reform though. 65,000 H1-B's clearly aren't the right answer to the global competitiveness challenge.