# Ep.2 Joe Binder: on what Program Managers really do, learning from his mistakes in his 18+ year career, and the balance he gets from kayaking on Puget Sound APRIL 8TH, 2022 | 01:09:11 | E2 [Play](https://jlampodcast.z19.web.core.windows.net/episodes/002-joe-binder.mp3) ### EPISODE SUMMARY Joe Binder is an 18 year veteran of Microsoft and Developer Division, with nearly all that time spent as an individual contributor. Joe's my boss today, and we look back on his time at Microsoft and the many lessons learned along the way. ### EPISODE NOTES This was a fun conversation about many things, including: - Explaining what a Program Manager in Developer Division does to three different audiences: his kids, a new college grad, and an industry veteran - Why he thinks he gets more mileage in his day job out of his English major than his Computer Science major - How someone can spend three years working on memcpy - What working with large partners like Windows, Azure, and Office really entails and how to be effective in that role - Why he really wanted to come to the Pacific Northwest 18 years ago and why he decided to stay - What it was like listening to customer feedback in the early days of the Visual Basic .NET team - What we should have built instead of Lightswitch - How his super power of not taking being yelled at personally contributed to his career success - The balance and joy that he gets from living near Puget Sound and his fishing kayak - Why the Azure CLI needed to be rewritten [Transcript](https://share.descript.com/view/qPhJergBd2L) Links: - [Visual Studio Lightswitch](https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/archive/msdn-magazine/2011/august/visual-studio-lightswitch-build-business-applications-with-visual-studio-lightswitch) - [Fishing Kayak](https://www.onthewater.com/fishing-kayak-buyers-guide) - [Azure CLI](https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/cli/azure/install-azure-cli) - [Microsoft Open Tech](https://blogs.microsoft.com/chicago/2014/07/15/what-microsoft-open-tech-does-in-open-source/)