Dear JobsBlog: I’m considering a position with Microsoft in Boston, but that means trekking halfway across the country from my hometown of San Antonio. What kind of relocation services does Microsoft offer and how can the company help me adjust to my new surroundings?

-San Antonio Schlepper

Dear "San Antonio Schlepper": Microsoft provides employees with a variety of services to help them transition smoothly during their relocation experience. I caught up with Jay Sirju who recently moved to the Seattle area to work as a SDET with the Windows Live Shared Data Experience Team in Redmond, Washington. 

Jay: After I accepted the offer from Microsoft, I was assigned one main point of contact to handle my relocation. He gave me a high-level overview of what to expect in the process and outlined some high-priority tasks that would need to be done.  I was then contacted by many third parties that were assigned to handle specific tasks related to my relocation. This included a legal team to help obtain my work visa, a tax consultant to assist with filing both US and Canadian taxes, two moving companies for my belongings and my vehicle, and a relocation specialist to assist me to get settled into the area. 

I actually took a month to travel in Japan while this process was beginning. When I got back home, the pre-relocation process seemed overwhelming because of the amount of paperwork and tasks that needed to be completed in such a short time frame. The paperwork included both documentation to handle the actual import of my belongings and various questionnaires about what I am looking for in a place to live, my tax situation, etc. Many of the importation forms also had pre-requisites that needed to be fulfilled as well. The one major pre-requisite involved obtaining my work visa, so I made that my top priority. Coming from Canada, it meant that I actually needed to cross the border and file my petition for the visa in the US. As I previously mentioned, I had a legal team assigned to help with this, and they had actually prepared all the necessary documentation. As a result, I had no issues obtaining the work visa. Once this was done, I was able to work with each point of contact to ensure that I had all the necessary documentation correctly completed.  Some of the documentation seemed quite difficult to actually fill out, however, I found that each point of contact was extremely helpful and very timely in addressing any uncertainty or issues I had. Each person also seemed to be in communication with every other person because there were times when I would ask a question to one individual, and another would respond with the answer. 

Once all the paperwork was completed and verified to be correct, I made arrangements for my belongings and my car to be picked up by the moving companies. After this was done, it was only a matter of days before I found myself in Seattle.

Jay: Quite a few groups are social in nature, so it is a good starting point to both meet people in Microsoft with similar interests, and to learn about after-hour social events. Because of Microsoft’s large employee base, I would believe it would be very difficult for a new employee to not find an internal email group related to one of their interests. Every day, numerous social events are occurring after hours at Microsoft, and I found that people hosting these events are more than welcoming to people attending for their first times. 

Since many people at Microsoft are also Seattle transplants, I found that the people I met were more than happy about sharing their experiences with me.  At first, I found that I was actually split evenly about asking coworkers about work related items vs. asking about relocation related tasks. Just through my interaction with coworkers, I was able to learn about social groups outside of Microsoft. One resource I would recommend to any new Seattle transplants is http://meetup.com.