No Seattle this summer...

Yeah, I got the email that starts with the word "although" from Microsoft today, so I won't be working there. Bummer! Yet, somehow, time... is still marching on! I wasn't really sure if I wanted to do it anyway. (If you're a Microsoft recruiter who googled (ahem, MSN searched) and found my blog after my interviews were over for some reason, I mean, I really wanted to work there, and I will hang my head in shame until September, at which point I will write four "killer apps" (one a month) and then interview with enthusiasm and vigor. But if you're not, I will air my true feelings: )

I don't know what I want to do. I don't know if I want to write software. Part of it seems pretty trivial: after you're done, the world is only maybe a better place. I mean, maybe the box that pops up in Microsoft Word when you click File->Print is a little bit better organized. But who cares? We all know that Windows and Office work pretty well now, and the only reason they keep updating them is to sell more copies. (it's an ingenious scheme.)

However, I don't know that. Who knows, maybe software development, when you get past the grunt work that I've done for two summers, is sort of fun. And I figured, if that's the case, Microsoft is the place to do it. The whole Program Manager (aka PM) thing is a pretty cool thing: I was interviewing for an internship as a PM, so I'd plan things and gather requirements and make feature tradeoffs and so on. Everywhere else I've seen, you just write code a lot.

Also, being at Microsoft is just exciting. If MS doesn't get you pumped about writing software, nobody will.

Well, I just took a couple hours break, reading articles like this one in the meantime. According to that article, I should be a chef. Or a ski patroller. Maybe I should...

It's a confusing life! And the whole job search is just one of the problems you have to figure out before you grow up. Maybe something in Europe will strike a nice chord. (Supposedly you come out of a semester abroad a different person. Well, considering that what I'm doing now isn't working all too well in many of the major areas in life, I'm all for a change.)