Hi! I'm Varun Shrivastav, working as a Software Development Engineer at Microsoft in Lehigh. I graduated from University of Utah last year. It's been a year for me, I have been working here at this company, so this is what I'm currently doing. But before working at this job, I was a developer at Infosys in India for over three years and basically the question where... 'what shaped my career path', is that my interest in Java Programming! I just knew how to program stuff and I just knew a few algorithms and stuff. And basically my interest in having a problem and solving it, writing a basically executable code for it is something that basically got me here. I was really interested in those things and I started small. And step by step I learnt things and working at Infosys for three years as a Java Developer so that gave me an opportunity to learn a lot of stuff there. While being at the University of Utah, I did HackerRank and stuff, so that really helped me gain more command on my programming skills, and that basically has helped me shape my career where I am today.

It's different! Right now with software developer companies, you have sprints. For my company right now I am given the responsibility, it's me who actually decides what are the tasks that I'm going to complete. We have a definite one month plan with twenty days coding period, ten days testing period! Every individual, every developer has their own responsibility to come up with a task that they think that they should be able to finish in this sprint and that is a plan. Say last week of the month there is a planning where we define all the tasks and have a discussion with our manager, they help us to decide if that is too much or if it is too less. So that is the kind of responsibility and decision that I have to make at work. There's more to it, in fact... I mean that's how the work works, that's how we do our work, but we are given a lot of... I mean we are actually supposed to make a lot of decisions on ourselves and not rely on our manager or other people to come and help us making decisions. Like decisions would be owning up a feature and let's say if that feature doesn't look good from the customers' end point, I am the one who can make a decision if that feature should be, let's say the UI should be like that or we should change it. That's something we're expected to make a decision and come up with, and have a discussion about it. So it's kind of very free, you're very independent and you are appreciated for making those decisions and coming up with those things. Working hours: As long as we are doing our tasks, it doesn't really matter but officially like everybody has to be here. 10 to 4 is the time where all the meetings, all the official meetings are supposed to happen. But people come here seven o'clock, as early as 7 and then leave by 3. Depends on what kind of responsibility they have, they have kids, they have other responsibilities to fulfill so it's very prompt. Like if I might not be able to come tomorrow, I can just drop an email 'I'm not coming tomorrow'. It is not very dependent or tied that I have certain number of hours in my work. It's free, but the thing that matters is that whatever I plan in my sprint, that task that I was supposed to finish, if I'm able to do it or not! We get a lot of freedom in terms of work-from-home and sick leaves, but at the end of the day it's the work that matters. As long as the work is getting done, we don't really have work hours!

Its not a generic thing where we're using standard tools. Obviously we are using Visual Studio 2017 for our (software) development. We use Git for our repo, repository, which is I think very common everywhere because Git is really easy to handle code. And then we have different tools to debug and logs. If you know a SQL database storage. We use different browsers, we have testing devices ranging from all different OS (operating system) from chrome, from macOS or iOS. What other tools do we have! We really rely upon Outlook, that's our first tool for our meeting stuff and scheduling is an important thing here because everybody is kind of like working independent, so you cannot expect anybody to be free at some point and you can just go and get help. Usually that is how it is, people appreciate it. But then if you really want to work it or find.. if there's a dependency, you'd be like meeting, you should be planning ahead. So prioritization is something that really is important at work. We also use Typescript for our UI. So let me tell you a little bit about my work. I'm sorry, I haven't been able to tell you that. We work for Microsoft Azure Cloud for mobile device management. We basically can remotely... if you buy a subscription of Microsoft Azure, you'll be the admin and you'll be able to remotely manage the mobile devices. In short it's like if you enroll your Windows laptop and you are the admin, you'll be able to send policies and settings can be configured on your devices for security reasons and stuff. For example, if your devices are enrolled by your admin, he can actually configure your mobile device to not use a camera for example for instance, or not to be able to use certain tools, not to be able to download something, like those things we use for security. This is enterprise product so we have this UI where admins can go and create stuff. Basically, coming back to the tools that we use is basically Typescript for our UI and we use C# as language. We use Power-Shell Script a lot for automating things. We also use automation but that also uses C# and those are pretty much tools that I work with every day. If I prefer other tools or not: It actually is something which I can make a choice, like I can use any editor I want of my choice, like I could use Atom or I could use Notepad++ for my thing or I could use the Visual Serial code. We could actually use those stuff and make our projections. We're not bound that we have to use certain amount of things but obviously the code bases isn't some language that which we have to follow so we just follow that.