My job continues to rock. The word now is that we'll all be getting iPhones come December, thanks to a pot of unspent "morale money". (Though iPhones, an Apple product, are a curious choice considering we're working for Microsoft now.)

I've told you all what the job is about -- our product basically lets companies put search engines their own site and control all the associated advertising, instead of giving a major cut to big third-party sites (read: Google).

But here's an analogy that might give you a picture of what my job is like, day-to-day. Imagine a bunch of engineers designing a new engine. In their office they have a working copy of last year's engine. Various groups are responsible for redesigning various parts of the new and improved engine -- some guys work on the fuel line, some on the electrical system, and one guy is fixing the carburetor that never worked right in the previous model. The groups toil away at their desks, and when one team has an improvement they want to try out, they snap the old part off the working copy and replace it with the new one. Every time this is done, the engine is started automatically. If it fails to start, or runs poorly, everyone knows, because they're all working off the same engine (well, their own copy of it). Sometimes, more than one team will make a change to the same part of the engine, and you have to work out whose change will go in the final product.

That's pretty much how modern software development goes. Instead of the engine, it's just a huge piece of software, and the snapping on of new changes and retrieval of changes from other people all happens at the click of a few buttons on our desk computers. The process has been refined over the years, and there's a whole lot more to it, but that's the gist of how it goes at nearly every company these days. The days of a single hacker working away in his garage are all but gone.

It's a stimulating environment, especially working with people smarter than you. (That was a hard admission to make for me, that some people at this job are smarter than me. It's certainly not the first time I've worked with people smarter than me, but I was always able to come up with some rationalization that I kept to myself as to how I was really the smartest, even when deep down I probably knew it wasn't so. The ego is a funny thing.)