http://career/ and Your Dream Job.

How to spend a little extra time today when you're not being inspired by our customers' passion to create software to help them reach it?

Go visit http://career/ .

Take a moment to try some sample searches and see what you come up with. See what kind of open positions there are around the various Microsoft business groups (and marvel at how long some have been open).

Now: what would your dream job be at Microsoft? Put a query together and see what the search results are. Whether there are matches or not, go ahead and save this job agent to send you daily updates should there ever be a new opening. And if you have lots of different dream jobs, go ahead and create some more job agents.

And when you get a match, just remember: you don't need permission to go over and do an informational. Wander on over and talk to the group and find out about their job and see if you'd be a good match and if their group would be a good match for you. Perhaps do a search off of http://msweb/ first to find their SharePoint site and read through their specs and schedule. In the end, it might be a good match and a good time to get interview permission. The perfect job might be one search agent away!

Also think about the timing: for those casting an eye at getting good results for their major review come next summer, now is the best time to switch groups so that you have enough time to contribute and excel relative to your peers. The longer the wait, the harder it will be to get a great review score without an established record in your new group.

Now, why do I care? While I'd love to have negative employee growth via fiscally responsible cut-backs and layoffs, I'm happy right now if we can hold the line at a zero-sum gain. It's much better for you to move internally and prevent an external hire from coming in (and either we can play a shell game to cover your departing or that head can just go unfulfilled as groups find their staffing needs cut back further and further).