Management and the Future of AI with Azure's CTO

**Darren Dillon** (0:00)
I was the manager of a team at the time where three or four of the people in the team were people I'd gone to university with, like they were friends, we had partied together.

**Dan Lines** (0:08)
Yeah, like true friends.

**Darren Dillon** (0:10)
Yeah, like true.
And we ended up going to each other's weddings and stuff. And I had at one point put these people on 90 days notice for their jobs.

**SPEAKER_3** (0:18)
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**Dan Lines** (0:38)
Hey everyone, welcome to Dev Interrupted.
I'm your host, Dan Lines. And today I'm joined by Darren Dillon, Microsoft's global CTO for the Azure cloud and AI business in Microsoft's consulting organization. Darren, thank you so much for joining us today.

**Darren Dillon** (0:56)
Hey Dan, glad to be here.

**Dan Lines** (0:58)
Yeah, awesome to have you on. I heard that you got into computer science for free beer. Can you tell us about that?

**Darren Dillon** (1:07)
It's true. So I went to college in the mid nineties. Back then biochemistry was super hot and everybody was trying to get into that profession. And that's the field of study that I was planning on doing. And I went to see three or four of the universities that I wanted to go to.
And when I got there, there was just no vibe, no atmosphere. They wanted to show you their labs and talk about the curriculum.
And I had a fifth slot on my application sheet for another course, and I copied one from my buddy, who wanted to do computer science. And I went off to that university for their open day and they were handing out free beer. They had a rock band playing. They didn't talk about curriculum. They didn't have a lab. And I had an epiphany and thought, this looks like more fun.
And I know I never looked back because my friends back then got into biochemistry and science like that. They all ended up with good jobs, but just not the diversity of opportunity that we have in the tech industry today. So looking back, it was a lucky event for me.

**Dan Lines** (2:03)
Good decision. I think from my experience, free beer goes a long way in not only computer science, but software engineering in general. If you can give someone free beer, you can usually get stuff done. So it sounds like you really decided with the culture, go with the culture there instead of the lab. I wanna give our audience an opportunity to get to know you a little bit better.
I saw that you actually worked your way up through Microsoft. I think maybe about 17 years now, something like that. You started as a solutions architect and worked your way up to CTO.
So how did you make the journey from thinking like an individual developer to being an organizational leader?

**Darren Dillon** (2:46)
Yeah, it wasn't intentional. It was just, I was fortunate to get opportunities that just cropped up as I went along. A lot of it was either being in the right place at the right time with maybe reorgs or the different sort of inflection points in the industry. Two big ones for me were, we had this thing in Ireland at the time called the Celtic Tiger. It was like the late 2000s where the economy was pretty much doubling every year. Customers were spending money like crazy. They were doing a lot of tech deployments.
It was the sort of precursor to what we call digital transformation. But then also that economy actually bust. We had the global.com bubble a few years later and then you learn a whole different set of skills. Whenever you're shrinking that, that's just as important to learn as how to grow. But I guess in terms of that journey, I started after college. I was a developer for about 18 months. And then I moved to a systems integrator focusing on infrastructure. So doing a lot of infrastructure engineering work, build outs of data centers and the solutions on top. And what was happening is that that systems integrator was very focused on what we would call mid-range systems today. So a lot of Unix, a lot of Oracle, a lot of IBM mid-range.
And I was hired as one of their first employees in what they called their Wintel team, which at the time we were starting to roll out pieces of MT as it was called, the precursor to Windows Server.