This year, we’re celebrating an employee’s admirable career achievement. Hannes Ruescher, an engineer on the PowerPoint team, celebrates 25 years working at Microsoft Silicon Valley. Hannes has spent most of his tenure on the PowerPoint team on our campus as a developer, lead, manager and director. He’s currently a partner software engineer.
Hannes is an embodiment of collaborative spirit and growth mindset culture on our campus. He’s made his mark shaping the development culture at PowerPoint, serving as a role model for many of his colleagues along the way.
“Throughout his tenure, Hannes not only demonstrated an unmatched drive for quality, but he instilled a deep appreciation for thoughtful architecture and advocated for thinking beyond the next milestone,” said Shawn Villaron, partner group program manager at PowerPoint and Office Graphics on Microsoft Silicon Valley’s campus.
With a penchant for clean code, Hannes stresses that “quality is key to win” and that “developing software and services is a team sport.” And his Silicon Valley team reflects that.
“[Throughout] my career [I’ve been] standing on the shoulders of many co-workers, and I hope many are standing on mine,” he said.
One such colleague is Ash Morgan, principal software engineering manager at PowerPoint. Ash told us he’s stayed with the PowerPoint team on Silicon Valley’s campus for 19 years largely because of the culture Hannes has helped establish.
“Hannes is our engineering culture: focused on writing robust code and constantly paying down architectural debt,” Ash said. “We believe that the team gets better as knowledge is shared.”
“The team would not be what it is today without Hannes’ stewardship,” said Marc Keller, principal software engineer at PowerPoint.
On our campus, Hannes’ presence is ubiquitous and welcome. Over the course of an average day, he’s in and out of offices helping colleagues who’ve sought out his guidance to help tackle problems and brainstorm ideas.
“He always takes time to address any issues he finds with the code or the product, talks to people about different design approaches and makes sure issues are resolved,” said Ela Yildizer Genc, a senior software engineer at PowerPoint.
Before Microsoft, Hannes lived in Switzerland. He applied to Microsoft after a friend of his joined the PowerPoint team in Menlo Park. “I sent my resume, was invited for an interview and the rest is history,” he said.
That history is something to be proud of.
Throughout his tenure, Hannes has tirelessly motivated the PowerPoint team to ship the best possible product to more than 500 million users worldwide, pushing Microsoft forward as a “fair, formidable and innovative force.”
Because his work was focused on the core architectural underpinnings of PowerPoint, working to ensure a coherent data model, good performance, high quality and good maintainability, Hannes’ work shines through in almost any PowerPoint feature. He also often worked on the underlying utility code that’s used throughout the product and played a significant role in redesigns, helping to modernize major PowerPoint components.
“There aren’t many people in the world who have had a larger impact on PowerPoint and the lives of millions of people who use it every day,” Shawn said.
