Day 4: The World Tomorrow Today

In case you don't know it, Seattle is wet. If it happens to be this morning in particular, it's incredibly wet. It's also cold(ish. Not like Midwest, my-bones-are-frozen, cold) in January. Despite that, we had a great visit to Microsoft today! We got to see the possible future of technology and talk about the future of AI! Bonus points to anyone who gets the reference to The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin in the title (all two of you).

An early (false) start

Yes. Yes it is.

We started off (not-so) bright and early this morning in order to catch the bus out to Redmond, Washington--home of Microsoft's headquarters. We've had good weather up until today (by Seattle in January standards), so we were all a little bummed by the moderate rain. I heard you can tell who the tourists are in Seattle because the natives don't use umbrellas. If that's the case, I'm glad to be a tourist. We had to walk a few blocks away from our lodgings to catch our bus, and by the time we got to the stop (and missed the first bus because we walked too far initially) most people were already soaked. I have to shout out Erik Nelson for graciously letting me borrow his umbrella, otherwise I would have been thoroughly uncomfortable! The bus ride out was also rather long, and we missed our stop by accident. For those who don't know (like me this morning), the Microsoft campus is, putting it mildly, large. We saw that we were right by the west campus, so we decided to walk over to our meeting place rather than trying to catch a different bus to get closer. After a roughly twenty-five minute trek across the sprawling campus, we were all a little sick of the damp. But, thankfully, we arrived at Microsoft for what promised to be an interesting day.

Tomorrow's technology today(ish)

I managed to stop in the rain to take a picture.

As part of our visit, we got to check out Microsoft's concept of what technology might look like in three to seven years. Unfortunately, I can't talk about specifics, but I can say that I have mixed feelings about what I saw. Much of it focused on Cortana (Microsoft's AI, or artificial intelligence, similar to Siri or Alexa) integration into daily life, which struck a bit of a sour note with me. To some extent, it felt very Big Brother, "One technology, under Cortana," type thing. I don't think I'm comfortable with any organization or corporation controlling every aspect of my life. The tech cult of Apple is something I've always been somewhat uncomfortable with, and this felt like much the same thing. Of course, Microsoft will be focusing on proprietary technology for their big demos, and I'm sure that, in reality, no one company will actually hold a true monopoly over the tech industry. Maybe it's a sign I've read too much science fiction literature, but when I think of a company being in such control over a person's work and home life, I begin to think of Shadowrun-style dystopias, where the corporation becomes the government and they run everything. Looking out my window at the space needle probably only serves to further these thoughts, but it is a concern as technology becomes more and more important to everything we do. How much should a service or company be able to influence? How do we know we have privacy? At what point will it be too late to worry?

Mads about compilers

I tried to think of an acronym for this, but didn't get anywhere

After coming back from the future, we headed out to Microsoft Building 1, where we would be meeting with people throughout the day. It is, as the name suggests, the first building Microsoft occupied, but now it houses the Microsoft Office marketing team. Our first meeting was with Mads Torgerson, a developer who works on C#, Microsoft's proprietary programming language. It was interesting to get a perspective from a person who is working on a project that could, theoretically, bug out and crash projects for millions of users around the globe. I'm not making that up, it is an issue he mentioned. He talked about the difficulty of continuing to develop and evolve a programming language in a way that it can change with the times, but also still have legacy support for current clients. He was the first person to encourage us to apply to Microsoft today, but he mentioned the value of new employees. New employees bring a new view point and way of thinking, that Mads encouraged. It felt similar to Amazon's "have backbone; disagree and commit." He encouraged us to be daring, especially as new employees. Something to keep in mind when I'm starting at my job this summer.

A welcome (lunch) break

Interesting as our morning talks had been, by noon we were famished, and ready for a break. Cherry, our host and member of the Office sales team, brought us over to Microsoft's food court (or one of them, anyway). They have an interesting system, being totally cashless. You order your food and pay either by credit card or employee card, much like a self-checkout at a grocery store, then you go and watch your food get made or assembled. It's a pretty sleek system and runs well, until you throw eleven confused college students in. Then you have a few deer in the headlights. This particular deer tried swiping his card in the employee card spot and had to be told by the next person in line that there was a separate credit card reader. In my defense, I didn't see it.

The best part about traveling is trying new food

Mild embarrassment aside, the system worked well, and there were plenty of options to choose from. I ended up getting an Indian-style lunch, including lamb saag, chicken curry, butter chicken, mango chutney, and naan bread. It was tasty, and worth braving the chaos of the cafeteria.

Language interpretation vs language comprehension

The wall at the Microsoft Executive Building

Our second speaker was Xuedong Huang, a lead developer working on Microsoft Cortana. He demonstrated the amazing leaps forward Microsoft has made in the realm of language interpretation and translation. Did you know that there's a free PowerPoint extension you can download for presentations that will put subtitles up as you speak? Or that you can use that, along with a companion app for both android and iOS that will translate what you're saying into other languages? And it's all totally free? None of us knew, but Xuedong was kind enough to demonstrate, and we were all blown away. He spoke Chinese in real time and we were all able to interact with him as it was translated into English on our phones. He talked to us about the issue facing AI development, namely that, though speech can be recognized above human parity levels, AI can't actually understand what's being said. He related the problem to the question of the chicken and the egg. In order to understand language, you need knowledge, but in order to gain knowledge, you must understand language. Unfortunately his timeline projection for fully functioning AI (which was a complete guess) was still about thirty years down the line. But looking at how far language interpretation has come in four years--from nearly zero to being able to transcribe spoken word better than humans--I wouldn't be surprised if that timeline ends up shifting forward.

A talk on the sales side

Cherry stepped in as our third speaker, bringing us more business-type insights from the sales side of Microsoft. She has been around Microsoft for a long time--she helped to launch Office 03--and had some interesting insights on how Microsoft technology can be, will be, and is used for sales. The rate of growth for sales jobs is unsustainable at a purely human scale, so the shift to digital is helping them to better identify sales leads and make more revenue. Cherry even mentioned Cortana's possibility for helping with sales, as customers could interact directly with the AI for help, rather than trying to scroll through pages of documents that may or may not be relevant. Though it wasn't my wheelhouse, it is interesting to hear about sales from a person with a lot of experience in the field.

The Luther connection

Our last speakers for the day, Jake and Kevin--Luther College alums--came in to talk to us about starting off at Microsoft. One of the most interesting topics they touched on was work-life balance. Namely, how do you balance the stress and rigours of a job at a company like Microsoft with your outside life. Their answer was that they leave work at the door, though they admitted that wasn't necessarily the case for everyone. They gave us a good counter-question to ask at job interviews, "what do your engineers' work weeks look like around releases?" It's something to definitely keep in mind as I go forward in my career. I don't want to be pulling seventy-hour work weeks. The other advice they gave was to work on as many side projects as possible. Commit code to an open-source repository, just to experience the critiquing process. Break things. Just be doing outside work to expand your experience. That's definitely another thing I can work on doing. Just maybe not until next semester.

A quick, easy dinner

By the time we got back, everyone was exhausted from the long day. None of us wanted to go far or spend time cooking tonight, so we decided to go over to Belltown Pizza, the pizza bar next to our condos. 

NY-style, cheesy goodness

It tasted good and was relatively inexpensive, but best of all, it was close. And, as an added bonus, they had pinball machines! I happened to have a few quarters from getting change over the past few days, so I played a few games of pinball. I even managed to win a couple free games, too. I'm no pinball wizard (I didn't even crack the high score list), but it was a fun way to relax after a long day.

Tomorrow we're off to a start-up in the downtown area. It should be a good time, and best of all it won't require waking up early!