When the Dream of Working for Microsoft was Far Beyond My Reach
05 May 2026 • by Bob • Microsoft
Way back in the early 80s, I was learning how to code on IBM 5150 Personal Computers in school, but I was poor and couldn't afford a PC of my own. Only my rich friends had actual PCs from IBM, so I had to make do with 6502-based computers from Commodore and Atari. Back then everyone knew about IBM PC DOS, because that's what you needed to use your PC, but few people knew who Microsoft was.
Jumping ahead to the late 80s, I was in the military and stationed overseas. Purchasing a new PC was still far too expensive for my measly salary, so I bought a dead PC from a coworker for $50, and it cost me $5 in parts and an hour of soldering to get it running. By then most geeks knew about Microsoft, and as such I installed MS-DOS 4 instead of PC DOS. I was remarking to my wife how much better MS-DOS 4 was than the PC DOS I had been using nearly a decade earlier, and she said, "Wouldn't it be cool to work for Microsoft?," to which I responded, "Yeah, that'll never happen."
A few years later I was out of the Army and working in the IT department of a small college in Tucson, AZ, and we loved Microsoft. Licensing fees for Lotus 1-2-3, Ashton Tate's dBASE III, and WordPerfect 5.1 were eating up our school's IT budget, and we had little left to repair our aging computers. When Microsoft came along and offered to license all of Microsoft Office for Windows for less than a license for any single competitor product, we jumped at their offer, and suddenly we had an IT budget again. Like I said, we loved Microsoft.
When Microsoft announced that they were going to open a technical support center in Tucson, I didn't think I had a snowball's chance in hades to land a job there, and that opinion was reinforced when I showed up to Microsoft's job fair on October 4, 1995, and I saw how many people had turned up for the event. The numbers were staggering: Microsoft wanted to hire 100 people initially, and 8,000 people applied for jobs.
I attended Microsoft's job fair with a couple guys I knew from my time in the Army, and we stood in the back of the room gazing at the assembled crush of people. At some point one of our group muttered, "Well, none of us are getting hired," but we nevertheless dropped off our resumes and left, albeit a little demoralized. Oddly enough, however, all three of us were hired. I said "yes" to Microsoft's offer on December 18, 1995, and 30 years later I'm still proud to call Microsoft my "home."
Looking back over the past few decades, I've had an amazing career at Microsoft, and despite the occasional stupidity of a bad manager or two, I've had a lifetime of great experiences wearing a Microsoft "blue badge." Microsoft was my dream job long before I interviewed with them, and my comment to everyone who asked what it was like to work for Microsoft has always been, "It's like working for Santa Claus. We make all the best toys, and we get to play with them before anyone else."
POSTSCRIPT:
One other thing - I was about to be hired by Artisoft (makers of LANtastic) when Microsoft made me their offer. At the time, I struggled with the decision of which offer to take, and all these years later I'm REALLY glad I came to my senses.
