Eleven years ago today (August 1999)

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Eleven years ago, I was in the Exchange group, working on Exchange 2000 (same as 10 years ago :)).  The summer of 1999 was when Microsoft rolled out it’s “Comp2000” system which completely reworked the compensation system at Microsoft.  One of the drastic changes associated with Comp2000 was a radical rethinking of how employees were ranked.  Previous to this, as a developer, your level was numbered from 10 to 15, with most new hires being brought in at level 10.  After this change, the levels for individual developers ran from 59 to 80.  There was a fair amount of discussion about “level inflation” going on at the time :).

Comments

  • Anonymous
    August 13, 2009
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    August 13, 2009
    My memory's a bit blurry on it, but I remember 11 years ago as having happened in 1998, not 1999.

  • Anonymous
    August 13, 2009
    Yeah, I realized that after I posted this.  I have no idea why I got it messed up.

  • Anonymous
    August 17, 2009
    Some of us still think in terms of the old level numbers...

  • Anonymous
    August 24, 2009
    I see where you went wrong: This post should be 1998 and the next post should be 1994-1997. Eleven years ago, I was a self-taught QBasic programmer (I learnt by modifying NIBBLES.BAS and MONEY.BAS). Later in the year I got Internet access for the first time and discovered an online community of other QBasic programmers where I learnt heaps of cool stuff. I also got my first computer that year.