101–110 of 177 posts
As a woman who worked at MSFT through the Ballmer era, I have to agree with this whole article. It really nailed it. Especially this part near the end where I never felt it would get better: "But my former female colleagues who reviewed this document in advance of its publication are unconvinced. None of them report feeling emboldened by the new Microsoft. They continue to withhold reports of discriminatory managemen…
> At its core, Microsoft is a company that makes its money the old fashioned way: by creating products of value that people willingly part with their money to use. Call me skeptical, but there's not a whole lot of products I willfully pay Microsoft for. Most of them I pay for with a strong feeling of resentment that I have simply no other choice, since there are no competitors to the market or the lock in is too stro…
> Call me skeptical, but there's not a whole lot of products I willfully pay Microsoft for. I have met many, many people who gladly pay for Office (specifically, Excel) or Visual Studio, so much does it increase their productivity. I'm not one of them, but I'm not an accountant and the code bases I work with are small and don't require VS's incredible tooling. There are also adherents of the cult of Visio, but I hone…
While the Ballmer years saw the company coast along on its old crown jewels, missing nearly every opportunity, Nadella's MSFT has shaped up to be one that is building a few new kingdoms - in the cloud space, open dev tools, new consumer hardware (see the upcoming Surface lineup) - it's definitely not the Windows + Office company of old.
As a woman who worked at MSFT through the Ballmer era, I have to agree with this whole article. It really nailed it. Especially this part near the end where I never felt it would get better: "But my former female colleagues who reviewed this document in advance of its publication are unconvinced. None of them report feeling emboldened by the new Microsoft. They continue to withhold reports of discriminatory managemen…
How do you get your employer to hear you? I don't think these problems are isolated to women. I think women just don't understand that there's an "old boys club" that attacks other men too. I know lots of men who say the same things. Pitting employees against each other. The masters recruiting spies from among the ranks to report dissenting comments from the servants. Cutting back on coffee breaks. Not being allowed…
At the risk of sounding flip, I'd say a lawsuit generally works.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can amp up a team by challenging them to give the very best possible user experience, so that your customers loves your product. Exhorting the team to "crush the competition" or "dominate the market" is not necessarily the best way to amp up a team. In fact, I'd argue it's the worst possible way, since that means that playing dirty patent troll tricks or financing things like the SCO lawsuit is a legitimate way t…
> Exhorting the team to "crush the competition" 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? L…
Curious, what was the attitude like on the early Band team? I absolutely loved it, and was active on the beta, but didn't have a front-row seat to the early development.
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Well that "buffoon" trippled Microsoft's earnings and doubled profits. But let these new growth areas slide because of the antitrust suit. If the market judged Microsoft by its earnings, it's stock would have been up. The internet, mobile was the blockchain and AI of the era.
Yeah, but the stock didn't go up from when he started to when he finished, which is evidence that the growth that happened during his tenure was all anticipated before he began. Good decisions can reap benefits years in the future, bad ones can take a decade to come to roost. You can say that Apple sales grew during John Scully's tenure. But it is kind of obvious that the company was exploiting a prior period of inno…
https://www.theverge.com/2013/7/11/4514160/steve-ballmers-re...
Also of interest in that memo is Amy Hood being put in charge of the Finance Group (truthfully she had already been CFO a couple months when the One Microsoft memo came out), which Satya appears to be getting credit for in the original article. She was appointed CFO a year before Nadella became CEO.
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How do you get your employer to hear you? I don't think these problems are isolated to women. I think women just don't understand that there's an "old boys club" that attacks other men too. I know lots of men who say the same things. Pitting employees against each other. The masters recruiting spies from among the ranks to report dissenting comments from the servants. Cutting back on coffee breaks. Not being allowed…
> How do you get your employer to hear you? I don't think these problems are isolated to women. I think women just don't understand that there's an "old boys club" that attacks other men too. I know lots of men who say the same things. If anyone thinks this is a problem exclusive to men, conservatives, or whatever group it's en vogue to pillory they're flat-out ignorant. I've seen women in power be utterly despicable…
https://hbr.org/2018/03/women-experience-more-incivility-at-...
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How do you get your employer to hear you? I don't think these problems are isolated to women. I think women just don't understand that there's an "old boys club" that attacks other men too. I know lots of men who say the same things. Pitting employees against each other. The masters recruiting spies from among the ranks to report dissenting comments from the servants. Cutting back on coffee breaks. Not being allowed…
I understand that you want to unite workers in solidarity (which I think is a good thing!) but I'm not sure if you're hearing that men and women experience issues with bad bosses in very different ways, and the channels through which they can respond are also divergent. The author of the original post believes that MS under Nadella is starting to turn itself around, but he was rebuffed by the people who would know be…
I've experienced both sides of this as a transgender woman. As a relatively effeminate man, I failed to fit in with the culture of "cocksure masculinity" as the OP calls it. But as a woman it's a whole lot worse.
The problem has the same cause and hits both genders, but it really does hit women harder. For instance, men might find they need to shout to get their voice heard because 'that's the culture', while women might get admonished even when they do that because it doesn't fit the gendered expectations of them.
As an effeminate geeky dude, I had employers tell me I needed to step up and take more of a leadership role. As a woman, I've had interview candidates assume I couldn't be an engineer because of the way I dress. I had a boss who treated me more junior the more feminine I was dressed. It's way worse.
The toxic boys club culture can totally make life hard for men who aren't like that - but it can be almost impossible for women. The hill is just that much harder to climb, in part because performing those behaviors that would make you fit in with the boys club can get you slammed for not being feminine.
It's important to remember that this isn't just about men and women, that it does negatively impact men as well - but it hits women a lot harder. Voices that don't match get ignored in that culture, but if you're a man it's much easier to make your voice sound like what the leadership expects.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can amp up a team by challenging them to give the very best possible user experience, so that your customers loves your product. Exhorting the team to "crush the competition" or "dominate the market" is not necessarily the best way to amp up a team. In fact, I'd argue it's the worst possible way, since that means that playing dirty patent troll tricks or financing things like the SCO lawsuit is a legitimate way t…
> Exhorting the team to "crush the competition" 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? L…
Every single large company I've worked at has had mandatory training classes where lawyers explain why you never, ever say or send e-mail with anything like that. If that ever got out on the front page of the New York Times, or worse yet, as part of a discovery effort from the FTC or state attorneys generals investigating abuse of Monopoly power.... well, it would be bad.
If there is anything like that from Zuckerberg, "I want every other social media company out of business ASAP" which is subject to legal discovery.... we'd be looking at a very nasty consent decree lasting years at best, or a forced breakup of Facebook, at the worst.
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I referenced post-WW2 Germany for their demonstrated ability to deal with a past national sin. Sorry, I thought that was an obvious reference. Edit: Did you really miss the word "after" ?
> Did you really miss the word "after"? Nope. That's why I said "so close".