Richard “Dick” Hamilton is a software engineer for the Microsoft Corporation. He has been in the software business for a long time and was brought into Microsoft because of his technical skills. He oversees a team of six programmers writing software for the company.
His office is filled with Beatles memorabilia. Mainly our interview consisted of him showing us programs that he is currently working on, including, “Visio.” We could definitely see why Microsoft needs to brings in the best and the brightest. Those programs looked confusing!
In addition to his other responsibilities, Dick is also an online advisor. Have you ever been using a Microsoft program, when all of the sudden it stops working and closes on you? A screen will pop-up that asks you if you want to report the error. While most of us just click “Don’t Send” and resume our work, if you were ever to chose to report those problems, they would be sent to Dick. Sounds like fun doesn’t it?
If I brought away one thing from this interview, it would be to communicate in a language that everyone in the room understands. When Dick was educating us about Microsoft’s Visio, quite a few of the terms went beyond our collective vocabularies, probably because we weren’t computer programmers. Being an accountant myself, I have seen the other side of the coin and realized that I have to explain deferred tax assets and stock options in a language that my clients can understand.
