Duncan MacKenzie

As an engineering manager, I have a certain amount of control over what ends up on our sites and in our systems. Not complete control, my voice is only one in the room, as it should be. One of the most important ways I can contribute to the quality of our sites is by saying no. Blocking or pushing back on requests that are contrary to our goals can be as important as what we decide to do. The goal is not to prevent change. Change is great, but randomness ruins plans.

I’m often asked if I have any advice for other software engineers, and the absolute number one piece of guidance I give is “make sure your work is visible”. Is it the most important thing? No, the most important things are doing an excellent job and being a positive part of your team, but right after those I would say is “making sure people are aware of the work you are doing”. I get quite a bit of push back on this idea, with comments such as: I prefer to fly under the radar. I don’t want to brag.

A little background Channel 9 is a developer focused community site run by Microsoft. It exists as an interesting little pocket team where things are quite different than you might expect. Channel 9 is built by a small team (4 devs), and was originally hosted at a 3rd party ISV. It has no connection to the large development and operation teams that run Microsoft’s many other sites such as http://msdn.microsoft.com and http://www.microsoft.com.