Reflections on My Career at Microsoft

> Neither one had any official impact on ratings, rewards, or career velocity.

Ah interesting, my understanding was that people who can gone through HiPo were sorta blessed. Then again I guess in theory the people who get selected for HiPo should already be doing the work to make their career velocity look good.

I saw all sorts of interesting stuff while I was at MS. It was a crazy place to work. It was sort of like working at a company that does everything 5-8 years too early, and then tries again 2-3 years too late.

* Tablets * eBooks * MP3 players * Smartphones * Smart TVs (Micorosft bought Web TV in 1997!! That is what, 15-20 years too early?) * Tablets again * Cloud based document syncing (See: What Sharepoint tried to be)

They also made some sort of automation creation tool for business users that, IIRC, got cancelled after one release and replaced with something else. I only know about it because I signed up to do internal user testing for it.

This is on top of all sorts of crazy one off projects. (In 2011 I was on a team attempting to make an autonomous household robot! How long before those become a viable thing outside of Roombas?)

I want to see an actual study, because my anecdata doesn’t match the claimed experience.

I worked on a consumer product in a highly competitive space. Our competition released products that dropped frames and had laggy UIs.

The discussion wasn't "We're going to make a smoother UI so our users have a wonderful and pleasant experience." it was "Hah, how the hell, they have literally 20x the CPU power, a GPU, over 1000x the RAM, and they are dropping frames? Let's show'em how its done!"

In certain domains, and when trying to perform at certain levels, you need every single human emotion you can draw on to get enough energy to find the motivation to do amazing work.

Is that needed 99% of the time? Nope. But MS sure as hell could have used someone pissed off about their mobile experience being terrible about, oh, say, 3 years earlier than what did happen.

Another example. Gmail launched 2004. Imagine if 2002 a senior leader at Microsoft had burst into a meeting of the Hotmail leadership team and started shouting "Why the hell do other email providers even still exist? And why the fuck do I have to still delete emails every couple of days? I want every other free email provider out of business right asap. Lose money on it, I don't care, just make us the best!"

But instead, someone at Google got upset about the same problem and made a product that completely dominated the entire consumer email market.

If you go into a competitive space (especially consumer!) with the idea of "we'll look at the market research and do what is needed to establish a place for ourselves" then no one cares about you.

"We're going to make a product that makes everyone else on the market look like incompetent jerks" is an actual mission statement that can be used to get things done.

The competition has a painful first run experience? Yours isn't better, it is perfect. Why? Because screw the competition. Your competitors have fat profit margins? Yours are razor thin, because screw the competition. There product has an industrial design comes in black and ugly grey, you have designer colors, because screw the competition.

If you are a multi-billion dollar company, and you have the resources to do everything better than anyone else in the field, then you either perform at that level, or you lose.

The iPhone launch was to be a tour de force of this ideology.

"They have ugly plastic buttons sticking out everywhere, we have metal and glass. They have a crappy joke of a keyboard, we'll reinvent the entire idea of an on screen keyboard. They have a shitty sales experience in stores? We'll partner with one carrier, and train the living daylights out of their sales people. Their UI is hard to use? We'll launch a world wide ad campaign where we show subtly people how to use the device during the ad."

I was at MS at the time. The idea there was "We'll let our OEM partners decide on how best to differentiate their product, they are after all the ones doing the main value ad and we rely on them for manufacturing."

Apple said screw that entire model, they just made it themselves, and they made it amazing.

There is an incredible energy on teams motivated by the ethos of doing the best and steam rolling the competition through sheer excellence. I'm not advocating for dirty business practices, but holy hell, telling your engineers "do good enough" is going to get you "good enough." When they wake up and go to work and the entire office is saying "we're going to make a product that puts everyone else to shame", you get a great product.