Author Mary-Jo Foley's profiles of "Microsoft Women Worth Watching" at ZDnet recently featured Mai-Lan Tomsen Bukovec. As Product Unit Manager for Internet Information Services (IIS), Tomsen Bukovec runs a team of 50 engineers who work across test,
Windows 7 Pro, development and program management. However,
Microsoft Office Professional Plus 2010, she arrived at this important position by way of an unlikely path. "After returning from the Peace Corps and doing a bunch of temp jobs, she taught herself C, C++ and Visual Basic from reading books while she worked at Microsoft as a contract program writer on the Communication Server software development kit in the mid-1990s. (She snared that gig because she was a good writer,
Windows 7, she says.) From there, she became a programming author,
Microsoft Office Pro Plus, while taking programming classes nights at the University of Washington. She then signed on to work on the Transaction Server team on what she acknowledges is/was a “very technical product.All these leaps are directly attributable to the mentoring I got at that point in my career,
Office Home And Student 2010,” Tomsen Bukovec says. “People on these various teams told others to hire me even without the experience because I had a lot of potential.”
These days, Tomsen Bukovec is doing a similar kind of mentoring as a way to give back. She runs mentoring rings targeting women who 'might not be picked up by other programs' and is helping them connect across the test/development/program management disciplines." Read the entire profile of Mai-Lan Tomsen Bukovec by Mary-Jo Foley here.