Coffee chat with Andy Glover

 On Wednesday of this week, I had an in-person meeting with an engineer I had a remote coffee chat with two years ago. Andy Glover is a Group engineering manager (GEM) in the OneDrive and SharePoint Organization at Microsoft that I organized a coffee chat with during my first internship as a New Technologist intern. Along with interesting chats about Seattle and Washington, we had a conversation about Microsoft culture, his leadership as a GEM, and how to make an impactful internship experience. “What is the biggest mistake you have ever made as an engineer?” I asked. Andy was quick to reply that he had once deleted customer information during his career. This conversation started from Andy mentioning how I should not fear trying new things as an intern because no mistake I will make will be bigger than the mistakes my manager or other managers have made. During the past weeks of my internship, I have limited myself from changing certain lines of code in my project codebase because of the fear of breaking something and not being able to undo my mistake. The ability to have a local version of the code base that I can create git branches in has somehow helped with reducing this fear. It was interesting and encouraging to hear a manager mention how they did not locally break their project but made a mistake that affected customers.

What was even more encouraging from Andy’s experience is how his manager technically handled the situation as Andy retrieved the lost information. This speaks a lot to Microsoft culture. My mentor, manager, and other full-time engineers are available to answer all my questions throughout my internship. This has encouraged me to clarify different parts of my project and also receive concise feedback on different tasks. Has Microsoft culture been this understanding of mistakes and encouraging exploration? I learned that Microsoft culture has evolved over different leaders. Andy also mentioned how culture is defined by the smaller teams, managers, and eventually the top-leadership like Satya Nadella.

Andy mentioned how there are different events organized to celebrate the technical failures that features and products in OneDrive and SharePoint have had over time. He emphasized how these meetings are less about the gravity of the failure but about learning from the failure. A crucial question always answered in these events is the lessons the engineers learn from these failures. I hope to attend some of such events before my internship ends.