David DeWinter

Graduation Date: 

June 2007, BSCS
Dec 2008, MSCS

Current Employer:  

Microsoft Corporation

Job Title: 

Software Design Engineer in Test II

Tell us about your work environment:

There is certainly a lot of fear, uncertainty, and doubt when it comes to the corporate culture and inner workings of Microsoft, but my experience has been extremely positive since joining the company two years ago. After finishing my Master's degree in Computer Science, I accepted the offer to start building the next version of the Entity Framework, an object-relational mapper first released as part of the .NET Framework 3.5 SP1. The first month was like trying to drink water from a fire hose—there is so much to learn about how the company works, how best to contribute to the success of your team, and (for me, at least) what it means to be a tester at Microsoft. Fortunately newcomers have a mentor to help them wade through all the information. Once you're up and running, though, the sky's the limit. Most of the work I do today involves collaboration with a small group of developers, program managers, and other testers working toward our next release, and in this atmosphere I feel as though I'm working in a small company (which I did for 2 years before joining MIcrosoft).

But the sheer power of Microsoft's network cannot be underestimated; there are so many smart people there that we often joke, "If only Microsoft knew what Microsoft knew." There are so many internal training opportunities to learn new technologies, methodologies, applications, interpersonal skills, and just about anything else when it comes to Microsoft assets. There's also a myriad of internal newsgroups where you can learn from the experts (literally the people who wrote the code) about the details of so many topics (e.g. F#, the JIT compiler, ASP.NET MVC, Azure, and CLR security to name a few things in the managed world).

All in all, even though I had to leave Utah, I don't regret coming to Microsoft for a second. The greatest reward I get out of my job is knowing that the decisions that my team and I make have a very large impact on the .NET community, and being able to work on products which constantly challenge you to improve your technical and interpersonal skills has kept my job so interesting that I often wonder how it's already been two years since I started.

What value has your education provided in your current employment?

Computer science is a funny field in that a lot of the technology-specific content I learned five years ago while attending classes at Neumont is now obsolete; that's just the nature of our industry. But Neumont provided a controlled project environment in which students could excel at building skills we would need in the work place no matter what, including project management, conflict management, impacting and influencing others, and most importantly, a sense of ownership for a product. The thing my cohort learned early on is that the instructors don't have all the answers. They expected you to research and incorporate things outside the scope of a course into your project if that's what it demanded, and in that sense the Neumont environment closely mirrors the real world. When new technologies are developed, you don't have the luxury of a professor who will teach you for a quarter; you have to be proactive and learn it yourself.

Why did you choose to attend Neumont?

During my senior year in high school I actually wanted to get into an Ivy League school to indulge my then passion for microbiology and biotechnology, but along came Neumont, a school which challenged the traditional four-year university by focusing on a specific field and offering a bachelor's degree in half the time that other schools would. With my programming experience limited to dabbling in TI-BASIC on graphing calculators and a bit of HTML and CSS, I wasn't sure it was the right fit for me, especially because the school had no graduates at that point. Eventually, I did accept the offer for two reasons: the enthusiasm and commitment to the Neumont mission that the administration and faculty showed during my conversations with them and the public backing of the university by corporate giants like IBM. I have never looked back.