Interviews

Interviews

Here are some of the rules of engagement (the full description of how to go about this has been uploaded to the Engineering website):

You must call your customer at least once a week to ask how they are doing
You must provide alternative contact details (e.g. home phone number) for when the customer has any kind of urgent questions and needs to contact someone from the Product Group. If you go on vacation, please provide your cell phone or hotel number.
Every 4 months you will be required to present a detailed overview of the customer, its operations and uses of SQL Server to our VP and the Senior Leadership Team. You will have 5 minutes each to do this, with a maximum of two slides – time is limited as they will have over 1000 presentations to sit through.
You will be going on-site with the customer twice or more during the year, depending on the customer. This may not be much fun for some of you but experiences may vary (e.g. Ryan's customer is Disney, so he will be living in DisneyWorld, Orlando during July and August this year – its unclear which Disney character suit he will be wearing. Rob's customer is Barnes and Noble, so you may spot him on the checkstands at B&N in Crossroads during the year. My assigned customer is the Renault Formula One team, so I'm going to be forced to go to all F1 races around the world this year – luck of the draw I suppose!)
You will be expected to support the customer by purchasing some of their products, and evangelizing their products to your friends and family, for a small percentage return on profits from sales. This may be easier for some than for others - e.g. Ryan will have no problem with Disney, but Kevin (who has Boeing) and Mike (who has Lockheed Martin) may have a lot more difficulty, but with a lot more to gain! Ingenuity will be rewarded!
For those (approx. 74) people who have offshore telecom companies (e.g. Brian who has Korea Telecom), you will be given a local telephone number in that country and should make all calls (including local calls) through that number. Your DSL service will also be routed through that country.
When representatives from the customers are visiting campus here in Redmond, it’s expected that you spend as much time with them as possible, including all meals. You should provide a personal airport shuttle service and if possible, arrangements should be made for them to stay at your house. You will be able to expense all costs involved with this, to a generous maximum of $35/day.
The spreadsheet with your customer assignments is at \\internalMSmachine\public\prandal\adopt\customers.xls
Please checkout the Engineering site for full details. Let me know if you have any questions, comments or concerns.