With all of this focus on internet social media – it’s easy to lose sight of those tried and true methods of decades past.  

In recent years, it seems like everywhere you look the term “Social Networking” is staring you right in the face. Stories abound from recruiters and jobseekers alike telling of how their latest social media experience lead to that last “great” hire. But what about back in the day of the dinosaur: before Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn dominated the marketplace? How did people network for jobs before social media? Did people really have to *gasp* meet face-to-face??? It seems like a foreign concept – yet recently, I’ve discovered that face-to-face networking events are making a bit of a comeback. And you know what else? I think they actually work better. 

After a suggestion from one of my out-of-work friends, I decided to try out a networking event known as the Seattle Job Social, which is held monthly at Twist Lounge in Seattle’s Belltown neighborhood (if you’re interested in relocating – Belltown has great nightlife, just FYI). While I’d been to my share of job fairs, this was my first social networking event, and I wasn’t quite sure what to expect.

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‎‎How's it going getting settled into NERD, aka Microsoft's New England Research & Development center?
I haven't done enough nesting yet, but so far, so good. mostly, it's a crash course in setting up computers, balancing meetings, figuring out hierarchies, learning the intranet … a radical change from the last six months of never leaving my couch just writing, writing, writing. ‎

Right: you're not only transitioning into a new job and new city -- but also out of dissertation mode. How's that going?
Yup. New city, new job, far far far far far more human interaction. I mean, in the last six months of my dissertation, I really didn't see anyone but my partner. I was a COMPLETE hermit. Mandatory isolation is required training to be an academic. That said, I'm loving the people at NERD, so it’s a welcome re-intro into civilization. I mean, they’re just as geeky as I am!

So, give me a glimpse into the range of researchers on your team.
Well, we have 7 full-timers including physicists, a mathematician, a cryptographer, a game theorist, and a theoretical computer scientist — or at least I think that's what they are. They label me a sociologist which always makes me giggle, so i can't imagine how badly I'm doing labeling them. ‎‎

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The Geeks in Question: Jennifer Chayes & Christian Borgs

The job titles: Managing Director and Deputy Managing Director of Microsoft Research, respectively. Also: spouses.

You guys are heading to Foo Camp later today, right? I hear that all attendees had to answer a few questions for their bios, including "Which Star Wars character are you?"

Jennifer: I said Luke Skywalker, because I'm always seeking.

Christian: And I said, "I'm D2R2!"

Jennifer: …It's R2D2! Forgive him, he’s European.

Christian: I don't know Star Wars that well, so I went online to find a test I could take to tell me which character I was most like, and it told me I was Handsome.

Jennifer: You mean Han Solo? I think you should have been Princess Leia.

What are you guys working on here at MSR New England?

Jennifer: We're building up a lab in Cambridge, Massachusetts, trying to bring together the "hard" sciences -- algorithms, cryptography, that sort of thing -- with the social sciences like psychology and sociology and economics. We want to understand what motivates people to connect to each other and seek out certain things. And we want model it and build algorithms on top of those models.

Christian: We've been working together for over 10 years in Microsoft Research. We have been looking a lot into networks, we have been looking into social networks. We had lunch yesterday with a venture capitalist, and he told me, "Monetizing and social networks are two ideas you should never use in one sentence." And I said, “That's why it's research -- it's totally unclear how you'd do it.” It's not just an algorithmic and a mathematical problem -- it's as much a problem of sociology and psychology.

So you’re looking for "hard scientists" who are curious about social sciences, and social scientists who can grok the hard stuff.

Christian: Typical mathematicians are likely to lock themselves in a room to think. But we want outgoing, curious people who don’t just want to do math, but also want to listen and learn about new ideas for their research.

Jennifer: A sociologist understands that there’s some valuable information flowing over social networks, and wants to make it flow to the right points without overwhelming people. How do you filter out the stuff that you don't want? Those issues can be viewed as problems in algorithms.

As a married couple that works together, is it difficult to avoid bringing your work home?

Jennifer: Our work is constantly evolving. Sometimes we're doing math and details of theorems, and sometimes we're talking to sociologists and sometimes we're talking to economists about political economics. Provided that your work isn't so narrowly defined, of course it's going to spill out into our social life. I'm OK with that.

The first people we hired for the new lab are a couple. She's a cryptographer, and he's a game theorist. I think it's nice when people's passion in what they do doesn't end at 5 o'clock, and doesn't end with a certain subject.

Christian: I would want to talk about the team building I'm doing now with my wife, even if we didn't work together. It’s exciting! When you get into a more centered mode and are working on a theorem, sometimes we'll go to dinner and one of us will say "I had this idea!" and the other one will say, "You know, actually this time is for our marriage — not work."

Jennifer: I think that happens even when people don't work together. You're just not always going to be interested in what your spouse is talking about.

How do you think the flavor of Boston will impact the culture of your new lab?

Christian: In Redmond, research is a big force on its own. The MSR computer science research department is bigger than what you find at the University of Washington. Redmond is really its own little universe. Here, it'll be much more important to be a part of the larger academic community, which will be much bigger than we will be.

Jennifer: We're sitting right next to MIT, right next to the Media Lab. We're right next to CSAIL, the Computer Science Artificial Intelligence Lab. Being so close to all these labs, we're already interacting with them. We do research with people outside Microsoft. We're totally open.

How did the idea to open the Cambridge lab come about?

Christian: Microsoft Research has labs all over -- it started in Redmond of course, but then 10 years ago we added a lab in Cambridge, England. There's a China lab, an India lab, and a lab in Silicon Valley. We said, "It makes no sense that we don't have a labon the east coast. There should be one!" And if it's on the East Coast, it should be in the Boston area, which has over 50 universities and flourishing academic and tech communities.

Jennifer: So, we pitched the idea to start a lab out here, and we got approved in a month! It was so fast! The downside of a big company is that it's hard to know everybody, but the upside is that there are resources so that when there's a cool idea, like starting a research lab in Boston, they'll let you run with those ideas.

As a company, I think Microsoft is beginning to be much more distributed. It used to be that Microsoft really was totally Redmond-centric, but as our business becomes more distributed, we get to be a more distributed company. We need different cultures, and the company realizes that and really supports that.

Being a married couple building a research institution from scratch — do the two of you feel parental?

Jennifer: Oh, absolutely! Me maybe more than him, I don't know if it's biological or what.

Christian: No, no. I just play a different role. You play the mother role, and I play the bad cop father role.

Jennifer: [Laughs] We've even got the next generation now … we have interns and post-docs who were thesis students of our former interns and post-docs. So, we're actually grandparents.

Links for the smarties:

• Homepage for MSR New England
• Boston Globe article about Microsoft Research in Cambridge, MA
• Jennifer’s full bio
• Christian’s full bio (no mentions of D2R2)
• An interview with Jennifer and Christian about the new lab