Teaching in Cambridge part 2 -- Microsoft in Cambridge, MA

The well-equipped work-out room at the Marriott was quite crowded at 6:00am. I finished listening to _Spook_Country_ on the treadmill then hit the weights. The valet parking guy pointed at the Microsoft building down the street and told me it would be much faster to walk.

Microsoft really is two blocks away from the Marriott; despite my problems at the Marriott it is very convenient. Also, there are lots of small restaurants in the area with plenty of variety. Both the street outside, and the Microsoft building itself are undergoing major construction. In the building they are re-constructing the lobby, installing a fitness center, a Microsoft cafeteria, and more office space. The location (right next door to MIT) is fantastic so I anticipate explosive growth, especially for the Microsoft research team. The people in my class are all from the Softricity acquisition -- http://www.microsoft.com/systemcenter/softgrid/default.mspx.

They are about to ship their first major release since we acquired them so some of the people are getting called out of class to service emergencies. Softricity was in a low-rent neighborhood of South Boston; this new facility is a big step up for the employees. They are all in a large cube farm on the second floor; their labs are on the first floor with conference rooms. The first floor also includes a very sparsely (10%) populated cube farm, a reception area, and major construction.

The training room is not yet completed; the projector and sound system work but there is no podium machine, no white boards, no easels, and no supplies (paper, name tents, stickies, 3x5 cards). The podium faces away from the audience. The tables were arranged conference room style but I was here early enough to set them up as group tables. We were also "agile" in our use of stickies on the wall to stack rank challenges. We used printer paper for name tents and graph paper instead of laptops for wideband Delphi. I got the presenter's mouse to work with PowerPoint but it is a little flakey on Vista. The lunch time movie streamed too slowly over corpnet so I used the public Internet channel9.msdn.com for behind the code instead.

The students are remarkably mature and experienced, with deep wisdom (and typical developer cynicism) about quality, process, scheduling, and collaboration. It appears the commute is quite terrible for many of the employees; trains are unpredictable; driving is impossible. I do not miss the East coast.