A personal reflection on nearly one year working at Microsoft after being laid off from Mozilla in early 2020. Covers the stressful hiring timeline (interviewing just before COVID lockdowns), onboarding challenges as a remote employee in France with a team based in Redmond, and a return to coding after five years in management. Projects completed include CSS Grid and Flexbox tooling for Edge DevTools, CSS variable navigation, and Focus Mode. Ends with a candid pros/cons list covering Microsoft's customer focus, accessibility standards, timezone challenges, and the impact of Google removing non-Google owners from the Chromium DevTools codebase.
Table of contents
How it all startedThe first few daysThings I've doneGoing back to codingThe pros and consSort: