The geek in question: Dona Sarkar

The job title: Test Lead in Windows Experience (WEX)

With Windows 7 on the horizon, it must be super crazy, exciting time for your team right now. It is so exciting. In all my years in industry I've never felt this kind of excitement or pride in my work before. So, it's wonderful, yeah.

So, you’re a Test Lead, but I also understand you’re an author of Young Adult fiction? How’d that happen? I went to school at the University of Michigan, and I studied computer science. Computer science was challenging, it was fun, it was a huge learning experience, but all my writing classes, literature, creative writing, that sort of thing all came very naturally to me. So, I split my time and got a minor in English When I moved out to the West Coast to start working as a dev, I started taking creative arts classes at Bellevue Community College, including fiction writing. In that class, I started writing my first novel. It was awful...

Didn't have a name, had no plot, and it was almost like a diary. But I learned how to create a beginning, middle, and an end of a story, and that was huge for me. People ask me, “How do you write a novel?” and the answer is you write a novel. The first novel is the best teaching tool you can have, more than going to any class or reading any book or attending any conference or talking to anybody is to write that novel, because you know what works, what doesn't work. But then I wrote a second novel and a third and a fourth, and along the way I got an agent, and my first young adult novel was published in 2005! Now I have a “software by day/young adult fiction by night” persona.

Tell me this: how is Microsoft like a high school setting in a young adult novel? Well, there's a lot of angst about things that may not seem very important a year from now. In both cases, you’re stuck with certain group of people. You know each other really well, you see each other every day, and there can be some internal drama. You're all trying to achieve the same goals — in young adult novels it’s often graduating high school, but at Microsoft we're all trying to do the same goal of shipping a product. There are people who you can trust with anything, there are people who you may be wary of. Just like high school! And you're bound by constraints. In high school it's your parents or your peer group, and at work it's time, energy, resources. We're older, we're supposed to be more responsible.

Speaking of responsibility, what’s it like testing for such a hugely visible product? People ask me, “Do you feel like you make an impact?” And I say yes, my work impacts a billion people! Not many people can say that. There just aren’t that many professions in the world where people can say “I affect a billion people.” It's just the coolest feeling in the entire world.

What’s your favorite hidden Microsoft benefit? Mentoring. When I first started here, I realized I need a mentor, because I didn't know what I wanted to do with my life. I tried contacted a friend of a friend of a friend — someone who was pretty senior. She immediately responded, “Schedule some time! Come on over!” It was amazing. We've been mentor/mentee for almost four years now. It's just amazing that someone who doesn't know me, has no obvious benefit to helping me, would, just because they want to give back to the community that grew them.

How do you feel about work/life balance? I said this in my Channel 9 interview — but my work is my life. I know it's not a very popular thing to say these days, your life should be full of moments that you look back and you remember and say, wow, that was awesome. For me, 90 percent of those have been at this job. Some of the best times I've ever had in my adult life have been at this company on this team. I don't ever have work-life balance issues, because life is work, work is life, that's just what it is for me. Work/life integration is probably one of the greatest benefits we have here —we, as employees can define it however we want.

Links:

Windows 7 Homepage

Dona's Channel 9 Interview

Dona’s Author Page

Book 1: How To Salsa in a Sari

Book 2: Shrink to Fit