Job defined?

by Michael S. Kaplan, published on 2011/10/17 07:01 -04:00, original URI: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/michkap/archive/2011/10/17/10226116.aspx

But I am not on a feature team -- I'm on a "central" team. One that works with colleagues in test to own the World-Readiness tenet in Windows 8.

If you look at the CSP definitions of a Program Manager, the atypical nature of the team's role would ordinarily be a bit of a liability.

Thankfully, our management has worked to define much of team's role and they do not just ignore those differences at review time (this has happened to me on other teams in the past, from time to time!).

I essentially own the website that provides a view to the locale data -- and that web server sits in my office.

There are even bugs assigned to me periodically to fix bugs when they come up. A web developer?!? Yikes!

I and one of my colleagues are the principal owners of the locale data in Windows 8. This data eventually ends up being widely distributed across the company.

There is also the checkin of locale data changes/updates/additions -- I own those checkins.

In many cases we are waiting for information from language and market experts. So sometimes I have to sit on bugs while waiting for an answer.

And that means that I can often expect to see mail coming in suggesting the problem of "active code bugs not assigned to development."

Oh yeah, I also assist some of the PMs from my former team who wanted to increase language coverage in keyboards.

Basically I'm their developer. Between that work and new languages we've added more keyboards to this version of Windows than have been added in some time....

Okay, so somewhere between program manager and webmaster and web developer and speaker and developer? I guess that's the job.

Now that I'm done, I remember that there are a bunch of other things, like blogger and guy doing the IDN plan and so on. Jeez I'm glad my review appeared to be a bit more organized!

Um. A production web server, one exposed to the outside world, sits in your office? What kind of network security is that? What kind of operational stability is that, for that matter?

Weird.

In one of my previous job, I'm a developer + web developer + server administrator + technican. Thankfully I doesn't have to give talks or training session because I'm not a talkative type, and I do not have to repair electrical appliances because I don't have licence to legally do so. (One of my another collegue is responsible for that because he have that licence. :P) My master who teach me programming techniques actually know how to repair a laser printer.

There's some part of the world that MIS means you have to know anything start with "電" (electricity).

I used to read your blog a while ago as part of an aggregate feed that I had to remove due to volume - now my company is trying to internationalize our product and I remembered how great your blog was (I know nothing about i18n except what I learned here) so I googled it and resubscribed. But I have one important question...

Why are the posts no longer sponsored by Unicode characters?

The Unicode characters have moved on to sponsor more interesting work. They'll still pop by and have a beer with me, but we have just grown apart....

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