Live QnA: About the QnA Team

Great questions, great answers, and introducing Katarina-QnA

Fri, 13 Jun 2008 01:29:40 GMT

It’s almost summer again – only about a week left to go. Last summer, David posted about writing great questions and great answers. In the past year, many new members have joined the QnA community, so we’d like to summarize the main points again here:

Great questions

· Are worded as questions (with a question mark at the end)

· Contain details in the details section to explain more about the context of the question (though asking a good question and then providing your own answer in the question details doesn’t qualify )

· Can be answered by anyone else in the community (including new members), and will find helpful (check out our featured questions for examples)

· Summarize the essence of the question in the question title

· Are formatted well and spelled correctly with standard capitalization (ALL CAPS LOOKS LIKE YOU’RE SHOUTING AND CAN SOLICIT ANNOYED RESPONSES FROM OTHERS IN THE COMMUNITY)

· Abide by the QnA Code of Conduct

Great answers

· Answer the question and are honest, thorough, and straightforward

· Present a great summary of your thoughts and opinions with any supporting data, facts, or knowledge

· Often include links to the page from which you used to help research your answer (this builds credibility for your answer and also provides a way for the question asker to learn more on his/her own)

· Are formatted nicely

· Are spelled correctly

· Use standard capitalization (remember… ALL CAPS LOOKS LIKE YOU’RE SHOUTING )

· Abide by the QnA Code of Conduct

Katarina-QnA

As you may have noticed, we are continually growing our QnA community through marketing promotions and links from other MSN and Windows Live web sites, we have many new users coming in to ask questions to our loyal QnA community. As our QnA community is expanding, so is our product team. We’d like to introduce our newest member of the QnA program management team, Katarina.

Katarina-QnA, meet the QnA community and Community, meet Katarina-QnA! Here’s a bit more about Katarina in her own words:

Hi everyone!

I’m really happy and enthusiastic about joining the QnA team, especially since I’ve been on QnA since 2006 and now I finally have the chance to get even more involved with the site!

Prior to QnA, I worked on Windows Live Gallery and the Windows Live Toolbar web site. Community is important to me, so I also serve as the Programs Director on the Silicon Valley Women@Microsoft board (one of the diversity groups we have on campus), and am involved with recruiting , intern, and alumni events. Another perk with these community groups is all the free food that seems to be available. (This includes the QnA team, which generously provides Tuesday morning bagels, complete with a few different kinds of cream cheese spreads.)

Finally, I have a bunch of hobbies like eating and dancing but most noticeably, I’m a language dork and enjoy studying languages for fun and in hopes of future world travel.

Welcome aboard, Katarina, and welcome to all our new community members! And as usual, if you have feedback on this blog posting, please see our latest message board thread.

- Heather, Lead Program Manager, QnA

Life of a Program Manager, Part 1

Fri, 16 May 2008 20:58:19 GMT

Hello, world! Nate here, writing my first blog post for the QnA team!

Mother’s Day was a week or so back, but thanks to the community, I didn’t miss this very important holiday and even got a few interesting ideas on how to make the day special.

We’ve all been very busy here with the new release and working on making the future of QnA even better. As we’ve been going through this, some of you have asked what exactly it is that we do. The four of us you’ve met so far—David, Heather, Dennis, and I—are program managers at Microsoft, on the Live Search team. Today, we’d like to share with you a little bit about our role and how we work to make QnA a better place!

Program managers, often abbreviated as PMs, are one of the three disciplines at Microsoft that focus on the software development lifecycle—developers, test engineers, and program managers. Together, these folks unite, get behind a project, make good stuff like our latest QnA release happen, and keep QnA up and operational 24/7.

At other technology organizations, Microsoft program management spans a little bit each of what is called product management, project management, and product marketing. It’s a multi-disciplinary role that touches every step of the product cycle. Over the course of a release, PMs act as the glue that keeps things together. Working with lots of other folks, they do the following on the QnA team:

· Customer and competitive research on how to make our site look better, work better, and keep folks happier

· Plan and flesh out those features

· Participate in the community of Live Search QnA

· Manage schedules and deadlines to release improvements in a timely fashion

· Moderate the site only when absolutely necessary (it’s not our day job, but we do serve as the last line of defense in making our community a safe and productive place to be)

A Day in the Life: the Planning Phase

Right now, we’re focused on ideas. Ideas come from all over the place and at any time of day. In gathering ideas and figuring out our future feature directions, we draw insights from other team members, our partners, our marketing team, and not least of all you, our dear users!

Before we dive in to designing new features, we first dig deep in to the QnA website and message boards. We draw insights in to the problems our product currently solves and currently fails to solve. This means focusing hard on how we use our own product, what users say about our product, how markets react to our product, and how folks use the site as our metrics measure it. At the end of the day, features should solve some fundamental problem for our business and our customers, and it is our goal to understand that problem.

Understanding the heart of the problem involves a lot of research, thought, and some intuition. For me, this has meant a lot of reading, a hearty amount of thought and consideration on your feedback, and quite a lot of discussions with folks on lots of teams. We organize all this information together, and we think through high-level issues customers face. Once these scenarios become apparent, we begin brainstorming appropriate solutions.

This may sound simple, but it can be a lot of work. Figuring out where our product should go isn’t easy. There are tons of different directions QnA could go; our dreams are infinite, but our time and resources, unfortunately, are not. We have to balance demands from our customers and partners, demands from our core business and company division, and limitations of our processes and technology. Balancing these separate needs requires us to understand and reconcile all these different perspectives.

Eventually, we develop our plans and our understanding of the product and market into detailed feature specifications …but that’s a story for another time!

Ideas? Thoughts? Now is the time to let us know so we can work together to make Live Search QnA even better with our next release! Please post your feedback in the message boards.

Hello April. Hello Nate.

Thu, 03 Apr 2008 18:45:33 GMT

Howdy QnA Community. Dennis here.

I hope April has started well for you – better than for me at least! With the help of the community, I’ve determined that I started April off with a cold.

On the other hand, Heather, David, and Live QnA have fared better:

Heather, because she has finally figured out how to turn off her outside lights via the electronic timer in her house that she has been trying to turn off for 1.5 years! (She didn’t know the brand of the timer but the links the community pointed her to actually enabled her to find the online instruction manual for her specific model – she won’t stop talking about how excited she is.)
David, because he gained valuable insights from the QnA community regarding the value of extended auto warranties.
QnA, because I’m genuinely happy to see the great questions and great answers being posted. I also hope that some of you found David’s recent entry on how and when to use Windows Live Spaces to be helpful. I know there’s still some concern around the occasional not-so-great content, and the inconsistencies around how reports of abuse are handled, but I promise you that we are continuously working to find solutions and improve our processes to make things better.

Let’s switch gears for a moment and dive into the true purpose of this post: I’d like to introduce our newest member of the QnA Team, Nate Janewit. We’re super excited to welcome Nate to our team. As a recent grad from Stanford, Nate brings a fresh perspective to the team and has already shown lots of excitement for improving QnA. In fact, Nate was so eager to come in on his first day that we instead had to send him to the emergency room to get stitches for the gash in his foot that he suffered due to a mishap with a shower door the night before!

Enough of me embarrassing Nate, here’s what he has to say for himself:

Hello, everyone! I’m Nate, and I joined the QnA team about a week ago. I come from a background of search, advertising, and startups. I’m really stoked to be with Live QnA!
I’m buckling down and ramping up as we move toward delivering features I know many of you have been asking for. I care a lot about technology and consumer products, and I look forward to making our site more powerful, more fun, and more rewarding. Our Silicon Valley team here is crazy talented, and my hope is we’ll deliver you the best, richest, and most useful experience for questions and answers.
Good to meet you all, and I’ll be behind the scenes making things happen for you!

Thanks Nate and welcome to the team! Expect to see Nate-QnA hanging out in the near future.

-Dennis

1 Month on the QnA Team

Mon, 18 Feb 2008 20:46:17 GMT

Posted by Dennis

It's now been approximately a month since I joined the QnA team, and what a month it has been! To answer a recent question: ramp up is done!

Truthfully, I hadn't used QnA much before I joined - like so many I was just a casual browser, surfing questions and answers. But lately, I've been asking more questions, and I've been absolutely amazed.

I've been amazed at the usefulness of some of the answers. I've been amazed at the helpfulness of some of the answers. I've been amazed at the kindness of some of the answers. I've been amazed at the generosity of some of the answers. I've been amazed at how a vibrant community has coalesced around this site of ours. And I've been amazed that I remember "coalesced" - a good SAT word! (do those even exist anymore?)

That said, like all communities, real and virtual, we have our set of challenges. As Heather noted last month there are some things we can all do to help. And like in real communities, improvements will take time.

Like Heather, I too am from a suburb of New York - and I spent a lot of time in Midtown growing up. Some of you may recall how long it took Times Square to go from how it was in the late 80's to what it is today. There were some days where it seemed that things would never get better, but the fact was that there was always steady progress. And from everyone working together, once Times Square started looking like a better place, it quickly became a great place.

I see a bright future for QnA - but it's a future that we can only reach with your help!

Having been with the team for a full month now, I can honestly tell you that these folks are committed to making this site a better place. Heck, I wasn't the only person in the office this past weekend, and I know there were many others working from home day and night - all dedicated to making our site better, and to working with you to respond to the recent flurry of activity. We know you want a community that's clean, reliable, fun, safe, educational, and enjoyable, and we're working on right now to get there.

Moving forwards, personally I am going to take an effort to provide quality answers more often. I hope you can find some time to help out others in our community as well, and to flag content that's inappropriate when you come across it. You could also come work on our team, but I can understand if you're not ready for that level of a commitment.

Finally, as I prepare to begin Month 2 here at QnA, I'd like to call out Alerts. They're pretty handy, and I love finding about when people answer my questions through Windows Live Messenger. David wrote a great post about using Alerts a few months ago.

How many of you have tried using alerts? Do you have any questions or suggestions or tips about alerts? Let us know in the comments and I'll try to address them in a future blog post. (Sorry, no time for individual responses to those questions!)

Thanks! I look forwards to seeing you online in Month 2!

(Edit 2/18/2008 1:48 to fix a typo and formatting mistake.)

Quality of Questions & Answers, and Introducing Dennis

Tue, 29 Jan 2008 22:40:10 GMT

For this week’s blog entry, I want to have a discussion about the quality of questions being asked on QnA. I’m seeing that more and more, during daytime hours, users do a great job of asking some good tough questions on the site – this is how QnA is supposed to be… people helping answer other people’s questions, offering advice, building reputation and relationships by helping each other – this is great . I often see great computer questions, advice questions, and of course with all the politics in the news, there are some interesting political questions being asked as well. Honestly, the activity and connections between people on QnA are what get me excited to come to work every day and work on Live QnA.

I do find some things that I see on the site upsetting – the name calling, the random or worthless answers from trolls, derogatory remarks, etc . Let’s make this community a better place by moderating bad people out. I’m originally from a suburb of New York City. The New York Metropolitan area is known to be a place that has a large population and sometimes suffers from crime (car break-ins, muggings, theft, etc…) but growing up, in our communities, neighbors would band together to create neighborhood crime watch committees to keep an eye on things and combat crime. Just like your real world neighborhood, QnA should be a healthy, productive community where members can go about their daily routines and business without unwarranted intrusions (“virtual crimes” so to speak ) . If you see any content on the site that strikes you as inappropriate, completely distasteful, or violates the Code of Conduct, please report that content by clicking the “Report abuse” link.

I’d love to solicit your help in a little experiment in dealing with the trolls on the site. My experiment here is based on my experiences from back in elementary school… Remember that kid in class who would make fun of you or wouldn’t leave you alone? These were the kids who liked negative attention, remember them ? My experiment is to do what my mom told me to do back then… ignore them! Let’s see if it works… if a troll posts a question, let’s band together to *not* respond at all – not an answer, not a comment, nothing! If a troll posts an absurd answer to your question, let’s moderate it by reporting it, but let’s ignore them and not respond in comments. I know this isn’t “new news” to any of our regulars to QnA, this is a topic that we’ve discussed before, but it’s a topic that is still important to the site today.

Live QnA is, at its heart, a place for you to ask tough questions, questions that may be harder or more subjective to answer, and get answers from a diverse set of people and opinions. It enables you to connect with others, real-time, around areas of interest. One of my goals for this year is to increase the amount of quality questions and answers, and also make changes that help our users better adapt their questions to the questions and answers format on the site. We will go into more detail here in later blog posts but I’m interested in hearing what our QnA audience thinks would help us reach this goal? Let us know…

With that said, I’d like to introduce our newest member of the QnA Team, Dennis Cheung. We’re very excited to welcome Dennis to our team. He brings a wealth of program management experience here at Microsoft and has already been super helpful in planning our upcoming release of QnA. Here’s a bit more about Dennis in his own words!...

My name is Dennis and I joined the QnA team about a week ago. Previously I spent 5 years on Microsoft Entourage, 1.5 years on the Windows Live Toolbar, and I’ve spent the last year or so working on Hotmail-related projects. But enough about my past – let’s talk about the future!
I’m super excited to be joining the QnA community and l look forward to make this site stronger, better, faster – we have the technology… and if not, we’ll just have to develop it! We’ve got a great team here in Mountain View, and I know some of you are super eager to see what we’ve got coming down the road. Believe me when I tell you that we’re super eager to deliver it.
As someone who is passionate about the blogosphere, I’m going to do my best to crack the whip and round up some great blog posts from the team this year. I’ve been on this team for just a week, and believe me when I tell you that I’ve heard a lot of your feedback already. I ask for your patience as I ramp up, and get into the swing of things. If you really want to help get things moving along, consider a career at Microsoft - we’re always looking for the best people!
Alright, enough cheesy plugs for other Microsoft products and jobs – time to go heads down and get back to making QnA a better and more useful place to be!

Thanks Dennis and welcome to the team!

And thanks to you, our users, for your great contributions to the QnA site!

-HeatherF, QnA Senior Lead Program Manager

Happy New Year and welcome to a new QnA team member!

Thu, 10 Jan 2008 01:21:11 GMT

Happy 2008, QnAers!

It's a new year and the QnA team is excited about the upcoming improvements we'll be rolling out on the site.

The team has been very busy working on the next wave of enhancements to the QnA site. There's certainly no shortage of ideas for improving QnA. You've all been sharing your great ideas (thank you!). The team also has plenty of ideas. It's quite an extensive and thorough process we go through…

· We generate/collect the ideas for new features and improvements to current features

· We flesh out all ideas while debating the pros and cons of each

· We prioritize everything so we know what to tackle first

· We define/design the features for each idea and then write specifications (and this can get quite complex on the technical side especially because QnA is a site with many millions of visitors)

· We then go through the process of actually developing/implementing the improvements

For the next version of QnA, which you’ll see sometime this spring, we are now on the last step (building and testing the new features).

On another front… it gives me great pleasure to introduce the newest member to the QnA team. Her name is Heather Friedland, and she’s our Senior Lead Program Manager. Heather comes to QnA with a wealth of Microsoft experience. And now… a few words from Heather herself:

Hi QnAers!

I’m Heather and I joined the QnA team a couple of months ago. Sorry it’s taken a little while for me to be formally introduced. As David mentioned, we have been super busy working on the next wave of enhancements to the site, and I’ve been working pretty hard to familiarize myself with the QnA site. We’ll try to be better about updating you moving forward. But as I’m still a newbie, please go easy on me as I get up to speed

The team here on Live QnA is actively working through a long list of feature ideas and requests from the feedback we’ve seen in our message boards discussions in addition to some of the great ideas that we’ve seen SebK mocking up (thanks Seb!) on the QnA site itself ! Keep those suggestions coming – we’re reading and listening.

I’ll keep my first posting here brief but I wanted to respond to a few questions I’ve seen crop up on the QnA site lately.

Question #1, “What is the future of QnA?” One of the reasons why you haven’t heard from us on the team blog is because we are in meetings all day long, researching and debating the next set of features for the QnA site. In this release, we hope to address and make improvements from the feedback we’ve seen around key problems and scenarios. While you may not always hear it from us, we do actively read and monitor the feedback we get from the QnA community to help us prioritize the fixes and features that would best improve your experiences moving forward.

And, in answer to Question #2, “Is there even a QnA team at Microsoft?” Yup – there is, indeed, a QnA team at Microsoft hard at work in the Silicon Valley Campus in Mountain View, California.

So that’s all she wrote, well for now – be back soon.

-Heather F, QnA Senior Lead Program Manager

Thanks Heather. And let me be the first to say – in our official team blog – that we’re thrilled to have you on board.

And to all of you, our users, the team thanks you for your great contributions to the QnA site!

-DavidB, QnA Program Manager

Welcome Bob Hough to the QnA team and the community!

Wed, 29 Aug 2007 00:38:05 GMT

We’re very happy to welcome a new member to the QnA team: Bob Hough. Bob has a broad range of Web experience and has held positions with various start-ups in Silicon Valley. I personally find it very interesting that he was a Producer at AltaVista back in 2000 when it was one of the world’s most popular websites (and a site that plays a prominent role in the history of Web search). Another fascinating tidbit about Bob is the fact that he was once employed in Saudi Arabia by the world’s largest oil company. (I still need to learn more about that!)

Bob will be helping out with QnA in many ways. Among other things, you can look forward to him taking an active role in communicating with all of you.

And now… a few words from Bob himself…

Hello QnAborhood,

A little about me and how I’ve come to join the team: Communication and human interaction interests me a lot, which has something to do with my working for several years as a newspaper reporter and magazine writer. As my print-based work was going on, along came the Internet, AOL, and online chat. All that was starting to be popular in the early 90s, shortly after I moved from Texas (Hook ‘Em) to Southern California. I saw a “Southern California” chat room and thought, “I just moved here and don’t know a lot of people,” so I took a look and met some great folks.

In a lot of ways, that experience was like online-interaction sites that have come along since then; people would ask questions, be silly on occasion, shoot the breeze, wonder about what the other people were like, and meet for things like bowling and playing flag football… which involved my wiping out a major knee ligament. As my nephew would say, “Big owie.” But I still like online communities.

In recent years, I’ve done a good bit of Web-related work, and I’ve enjoyed message boards that relate to some personal interests. Any other QnAers out there who are fans of boxing, auto racing, the TV shows “Lost” or “The Amazing Race?”

I’ll be doing various things, to include blogging and some moderation—responding to questions with QnA or QnA Team tags, banning people when necessary, and removing content. Banning can be a sensitive subject and in some cases, there’s a view that it’s the wrong call. Nobody’s going to agree with everything that’s done on QnA or on any other site, but know that we’re not vicious and inflexible… though we like to make sure Ron’s had his coffee…. Just kidding, Ron. We have noted that a search on the “funtering” tag yields a whole lot of results and we like some fun, too. I’ll add, though, that in my experience with QnA, and with other sites, active moderation annoys a few people, but the overwhelming majority of community members are glad for it.

As always, we welcome your comments, and hope you’re enjoying the QnA experience as much as we are.

Sincerely,

Bob

Once again, we welcome Bob to the QnA Team!

-DavidB, QnA Program Manager

Big welcome to David Bernstein from the QnA Team and the Community!

Thu, 12 Jul 2007 22:37:16 GMT

DavidB, as he’s known in our team (because there are several other Davids), has been with Microsoft for a little over a year and started in the fun and creative Incubation Team. QnA is excited to have him join the team bringing along his creative nature and great people skills. Y’all will get to know him within the community, but David is offering a few words about himself below.

Heeeeere’s David….

Hi QnA-ers!
I’m excited to be a part of the QnA Team. As Linda mentioned, I joined Microsoft last summer (July 2006). The company lured me away from my job and life in Southern California where I was working as Program Manager for a small tech company. My job there was to manage the development and maintenance of websites aimed at helping students figure out where they want to go to college. It was a fun job, but the opportunity to build software and websites for Microsoft was just too good an opportunity to pass up!
Since joining Microsoft, I have worked on a variety of projects. I’m most excited about joining the QnA Team because I love focusing on websites that are aimed at helping people. And that’s what QnA is all about! I particularly enjoy working to make websites as easy to use and as intuitive as possible (usability and user-centered design). And I know the QnA Team has lots of plans in this area, so I’m eager to do my part.
I’ve been diving in and getting a good feel for the QnA community, and it’s definitely been a learning experience. I love the idea of a question-and-answer site, and I see so much potential for QnA.
So, nice to meet you all, and I’ll see you on QnA!
-DavidB
QnA Program Manager

Once again, we welcome David to the QnA Team!

-LindaW
QnA Program Manager

One word: Gianluca

Wed, 28 Jun 2006 21:15:42 GMT

Anyone remember Madonna's last name? Us neither. Some people are born to have the glamor of only one name, and among our developers, Gianluca is that guy. Together with Jason Wodicka, he is the core of a "tag team" that creates some of QnA's special community-oriented features.

Gianluca is also the SECOND team member that has chosen DeNiro to play him in the QnA Movie. I'm not sure what to say about that, except, our devs are tough. And if you think about it, no one calls DeNiro "Bob" - they call him DeNiro. So Bob's a one-namer too.

--Betsy

Name: Gianluca

Role on Team: Tag handler.

Years at Microsoft: < 1

What’s the best thing that happens to you on the way to work?

finding the occasional great unexpected song while listening to some obscure European radio show.

Beverage of choice: Vodka Martini, shaken, lemon twist.

Comfort food of choice: Bread and similarly high-carb foods :)

What one thing describes the place you grew up?

Rain

What is the song you wish they’d play when you enter the room?

The Orb - Little Fluffy Clouds

What actor would you want to play you in the movie about QnA?

Robert De Niro in his Taxi Driver persona or Michael Douglas in Falling Down.

The main thing to realize here is, while you can get both Krista and Jason to have smoke coming out their ears if you confusing taxonomies with tagging, well, Gianluca will do his DeNiro. Don't make him do that.

1. How did you get involved on QnA?

By chance/luck, I wanted to get into the search space, and QnA was the first MSN Search group formed in the Silicon Valley Campus.

2. What do you do every day as part of your work on QnA?

Fix bugs and occasionally come up and implement some cool tag-related features. For now it's mostly bug fixing though :)

3. Is there someone you go to for answers a lot?

Any of the veterans on the team.

a) What kinds of stuff do you ask them?

All sort of basic questions about the project that I'm too busy to figure out on my own.
b) What’s the best answer they ever gave you?

Any answer that reassures me that I'm not a total idiot :)

4. Are there people for whom you give advice or are the answer guru to?

No one in particular but I'm the go-to person for anything related to tags, technically and philosophically.

a) What kinds of things do you tell them ?

I explain over and over that tagging IS NOT a taxonomy.

b) How did you become that kind of expert?

I lived and breathed tags for months...

5. What’s the worst question anyone ever asked you? The best?

The worst were all the questions I couldn't answer during the exams in college, in front of 200 people staring and listening intently to you while taking notes... "Are you happy?" is probably the best one.

Go Red Sox, Go Soccer! Sarah Rudd

Thu, 15 Jun 2006 01:42:52 GMT

Betsynote: Sorry about that, but this is late. First, because of a mishap with the "river crud" which I hope to blog about later once I get embarassing photos in my hands, and also because of the World Cup...I will just have to post a picture of Sarah later this week.

Sarah is all about the World Cup. Who is Sarah? Read on....

Name: Sarah Rudd

Role on Team: SDE/T (that's software development engineer in test)

Years at Microsoft: less than 1

What’s the best thing that happens to you on the way to work?

Breezing onto 520 thanks to the HOV lane for the on-ramp. (For non-Seattleites, an HOV lane is the carpool lane.)

Beverage of choice: Fanschop (Orange Fanta with beer…try it, it’s delish!)

Comfort food of choice: Empanadas

What one thing describes the place you grew up?

We’re famous for grapes and revolutions!

What is the song you wish they’d play when you enter the room?

There was a time in my life where I entered a room and people prompted me for my rendition of “Got My Money” by ODB. Having matured a little I will leave the singing to others and choose “Dance to the Underground” by Radio4.

What actor would you want to play you in the movie about QnA?

Christine Taylor aka Matilda Jeffries from Zoolander.

Betsynote: When I first met Sarah she was limping from some sports injury. Now she's more spry and taking on our numerous steps with aplomb. We had a chat about the Red Sox winning the World Series and sighed. When you grow up with "the Curse" in New England, the Red Sox winning just never gets old.

In this next section you find out more about Sarah's intrepid adventures in sports.

1. How did you get involved on QnA?

Someone at MSN Search lured me away from the sun and sand of South America with tales of Internet glory.

2. What do you do every day as part of your work on QnA?

I try to break things.

3. Is there someone you go to for answers a lot?

I’m new here so I ask a lot of questions to everyone

a) What kinds of stuff do you ask them?

Aside from work related stuff I ask around about cool places in the area since I’ve only lived here a few months.

b) What’s the best answer they ever gave you?

Free donuts every Friday!

4. Are there people for whom you give advice or are the answer guru to?

I have an unhealthy obsession with soccer. I’ll talk for hours to anyone who will listen.

a) What kinds of things do you tell them?

The US is actually GOOD at soccer and there are people here who are passionate about soccer.

b) How did you become that kind of expert?

I’ve been playing soccer since I was 6, but I didn’t attend my first professional game until 1993. US beat England 2-0 and since then I have had faith that the US can become one of the top teams in the World.

5.What’s the worst question anyone ever asked you? The best?

Best: (after scoring my first goal in South America) Where did you learn to play?

Worst: People used to ask me if they could use my dog for breeding. While I was flattered that they wanted his genes passed on, I was a little creeped out by organizing such events for him.

Betting on QnA: Jason Arbon, Test Lead

Tue, 06 Jun 2006 21:47:40 GMT

Though this is changing as more Microsoft employees enter the blogosphere, you still don't hear as much from the Test side of the house as you do those uppity pms and developers. That's why it was very gratifying to find so many of the QnA test team responding to my request for blog posts.

Jason is the mighty ringleader and you can see him moseying along the hallways, checking in and talking with folks, sometimes clacking some poker chips in his hand in a rhythmic counterpoint to the mosey. He is a poker fan, and thus a betting sort...but when it comes to testing, he's all about 100% validation and careful signoff.

The red demon eyes in the photo are the fault of my digital camera! I swear!

--Betsy

Name: Jason Arbon

Role on Team: Test Lead

Years at Microsoft: 6, I think.

What’s the best thing that happens to you on the way to work?

I wake up and find myself driving on I-90.

Beverage of choice:

Was Coke, now its Coke Zero for obvious reasons :)

Comfort food of choice:

My grandmother's spaghetti

What one thing describes the place you grew up?

Country

What is the song you wish they’d play when you enter the room? Hmmm…..NPR

What actor would you want to play you in the movie about QnA?

Chris Farley

1. How did you get involved on QnA?

I was working on WinFS when I realized that it didn’t match the way I actually try to gather and find information—winfs is like going to the container store and having an elaborate system of buckets and subbuckets.

2. What do you do every day as part of your work on QnA?

Think about all the cool additions we can make to the service

3. Is there someone you go to for answers a lot?

Yes, Ed.

a) What kinds of stuff do you ask them?

How everything works and I seek validation and counseling

b) What’s the best answer they ever gave you?

I can't remember the question, but he said "Not so much."’

4. Are there people for whom you give advice or are the answer guru to?

No, I’m usually talking so much trying to evangelize my ideas that they don’t have a chance to ask…

a) What kinds of things do you tell them?

Thoughts on testing

b) How did you become that kind of expert?

Not an expert, but I have tons of experience that tell me what not to do again

5. What’s the worst question anyone ever asked you? The best?
Worst: “When?”
Best: “Why?”

"The Other College Dev Guy": Paul Miller

Thu, 01 Jun 2006 17:27:42 GMT

Paul's definitely a dev dude in his own right, but sometimes folks think he was the Intern, and that's Patrick.

Interestingly, he's not the only QnA Team member who believes they should be played by Robert DeNiro in the QnA movie. Bob , you are going to have your work cut out for you if we ever make this flick.... ;-)

Name: Paul Miller

Role on Team: Lord of the Upright and Slayer of wicked things.

Years at Microsoft: < 1.

What’s the best thing that happens to you on the way to work? I get to keep the top down.

Beverage of choice: Grape juice with Equal or Sweet-n-Lo

Comfort food of choice: A Porterhouse steak.

What one thing describes the place you grew up? Kentucky.

What is the song you wish they’d play when you enter the room? Fett’s Vette (M.C. Chris).

What actor would you want to play you in the movie about QnA? Robert DeNiro.

1. How did you get involved on QnA?
On the second day Randy (Betsynote: Randy Kern, Ed's manager) sayeth onto me, you shall make the Questioning and Answering. And it was good.

2. What do you do every day as part of your work on QnA?

Fix bugs. Implement Features. Ride a shimmering chariot of glory around the office.

3. Is there someone you go to for answers a lot?

Ed Harris

a) What kinds of stuff do you ask them?

“What the hell is wrong with this thing.”

b) What’s the best answer they ever gave you?

"Who wrote this? Who raises these people?"

4. Are there people for whom you give advice or are the answer guru to?

All my swarthy team mates.

a) What kinds of things do you tell them?

If you need it we should index it.

b) how did you become that kind of expert?

A sorted affair with the index gen pipeline.

(Betsynote: this was the worst Search pun I've heard to date, bar none)

5. What’s the worst answer you had to give anyone? The best?
Best) A punch in the face
Worst) see above

6. What would you advise young people who want to grow up and do your job?

You’re a huge dork. Don’t you want to be an astronaut or something?

7. The best book I’ve read in the last year was Batman: the Dark Knight Returns, and it was best because…. (SPOILER WARNING) 50 year old Batman fights Superman in mech-suit and basically wins before faking his own death. Need I go on?

8. How would you describe your fashion sense?
Fashion is a four letter word.

9. What’s your favorite quote (and who is it by)?
This week: “With my last breath, I curse Zoidberg!” Cool kids will know what that’s from.

10. Who would you want to trade a day in the life of, and why?
Could I be Carrot Top, and strangle myself?

11. In your house, are you the Neat One or the Messy One?

Thanks to bipolar disorder and the wonders of living alone I get to be both.

12. What’s your advice for the shy and the lovelorn?

Intoxication works wonders.

13. What’s your advice for the person who wants to change the world?

Move out of your parents’ house. Small steps.

14. If you could have one superpower, what would it be?

Superpowers are for sissies. Batman doesn’t need no stinking superpowers.

Former Intern, Patrick Davin

Tue, 30 May 2006 16:55:18 GMT

So I told you we'd eventually bring out the intern who was the "once upon a time" part of the QnA story. Together with "the other college guy" Paul Miller, they do a lot of critical work on QnA - unusual perhaps for some companies but not Microsoft. --Betsy

Name: Patrick Davin

Role on Team: developer

Years at Microsoft: I started Sept 2005.

What’s the best thing that happens to you on the way to work?

Sometimes everyone in the passing lane drives faster than 60.

Beverage of choice: Mountain Dew! During my internship I built a Mountain Dew pyramid, but the cans took up too much room so I stopped doing that.

Comfort food of choice: Does beer count as a food?

What one thing describes the place you grew up? Suburbia. I grew up on Long Island. ;)

What is the song you wish they’d play when you enter the room?

REM’s “Man on the Moon”

What actor would you want to play you in the movie about QnA?

Ethan Hawke, because Gattaca is one of my favorite movies.

1. How did you get involved on QnA?

In the summer of 2004, as my internship project I built a QnA prototype running on a single machine. It was completely unscale-able, but was a really cool way to try out the concept and let other people on the team play with a community-based Q&A system. After that, I was hooked and came back in Sept 2005 to work on the new QnA team.

2. What do you do every day as part of your work on QnA?

Mostly I write code. I also spend time debugging that code, supporting the test bed, and helping diagnose problems.

3. Are there people for whom you give advice or are the answer guru to?
a) What kinds of things do you tell them
b) how did you become that kind of expert?

We’re a pretty small team, so there is plenty of opportunity to help out others in the group. Usually I help out new team members with setting up our development environment, or help answer questions about bugs or features in the user interface.
I also work on assisting the Test team, though I think they are secretly plotting my demise for breaking their tests too often.

4. The best movie(s) I’ve seen at a theater in the last year was _____ and it was best because….

King Kong. It’s hard to beat seeing three T-Rexes fight a giant ape.

5. Who would you want to trade a day in the life of, and why?

I would trade spots with a National Geographic photographer for a day in some exotic location like the Brazilian rainforest or Antarctica. Photography is one of my favorite hobbies. From time to time, I post some of my photos to an online photography community called photoSIG.

6. If the QnA community could answer any question for you, what would that be? Why?

Who would win in a fight - Spiderman, or Wolverine? Actually, I hope we don't get too many questions like this (because we all know the answer is Wolverine).

7. In your house, are you the Neat One or the Messy One?

I'm kind of a cross between Joey and Monica from Friends. I don't mind having just beer and pizza in the fridge, but if any of it is spilled on the ground, I clean it up right away.

Funky Fresh Nils Pohlmann

Thu, 25 May 2006 20:59:32 GMT

It’s not often that an underling gets to unduly flatter, I mean, semi-interview their boss for a blog post. But since Nils didn’t like how his blog bio turned out, we decided you’d get more of a flavor of Nils if, well, I pimped him a little instead of relying on routine dry questions to get to his essence.

First off, Nils is tall. He is also thin, and has that runner’s build that makes perfect sense because he’s nuts enough to – I mean disciplined enough – to run as part of his morning routine. Every day.

Nils is also a straight shooter. I’m from the East Coast, so I can take it, but sometimes the emails run even more spare than John Wayne movie dialogue. Well, maybe not that, but he’s to the point. For flowery marketing copy, you must turn elsewhere: Nils tells it like it is.

The other thing you would notice about Nils is that he tends to smile a lot. And, it’s more Mona Lisa than seems possible in a lead program manager. First of all program managers tend to be distinguished from marketing people in the amount of project paranoia they must absorb into their bones in order to get anything done. Cheerful smiling during paranoia makes for an odd cognitive process.

Nils is a closer and mitigates risk with the best of them so I know he understands paranoia. When he does the Mona Lisa deal, it is usually because he is happy - mind you – we just can’t figure out why that is. Then, WE get paranoid and perhaps a bit unnerved. Which if you have to admit it, ruling your underlings by incomprehensible smiling is a lot better than bellowing, shouting, or the costly method of bribery.

Bribery. Which reminds me. At one point Nils mentioned he’s into good wines and seemed to know a bunch about it. So, as I did for my former boss Sandy, I brought in a bottle from a few that my Dad has sent me ( he collects California wines). Nils was immediately worried that it was unseemly. Later, like the smart man he is, he went to a family outing and ended up drinking it with his relatives. I’m not sure what the meaning of this tale is, but, frankly, I think anyone who is my boss probably needs a glass of wine now and again, just to handle the strain, and I’m not going to judge anyone harshly on that score. This story perhaps just proves he is both a man of principle, and practicality.

So you see – Nils Pohlmann is the perfect lead for QnA. He is a man who raises questions, yet gives us answers. And see look, here’s his bio. He modestly thinks he would not be entertaining enough to be in the QnA movie, but really, he is an enigma wrapped in a riddle contained in a jogging outfit.

I kid you not.

--Betsy

Name: Nils Pohlmann

Role on Team: Lead Program Manager

Years at Microsoft: 10 this September.

What’s the best thing that happens to you on the way to work?

As I run over the Montlake bridge on the way to the bus, I look East and see crews rowing through the Montlake cut and the sun coming up over Lake Washington and the Cascade mountains.

Beverage of choice: Grande mocha from Zoka roasters.

Comfort food of choice: Fried chicken from Atlas foods.

What one thing describes the place you grew up? Providence RI is charming.

What is the song you wish they’d play when you enter the room?

Don’t Panic by Coldplay.

What actor would you want to play you in the movie about QnA?

Christopher Walken because he is always entertaining. Not that I am entertaining, but I’d like the QnA movie to be.