Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Reflections on My Career at Microsoft

medium.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 177 posts

Re: Reflections on My Career at Microsoft

#121

Post by BeetleB »

com2kid wrote: post #100
tytso wrote: post #95

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…

> 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!"

I can easily imagine this. The outcome would be that I would go outdoors, raise my hand, and ask "Any company out there willing to pay me to leave?"

Tell me: Did Google have a senior leaser burst into a meeting and start shouting "Why the the fuck do I have to still delete emails every couple of days? I want every free email provider out of business right asap. Lose money on it, I don't care, just make us the best!"

Is that how Gmail became dominant?

If your goal is to only employ one type of person - uber competitive type who cannot motivate themselves without wild pep talks - you're going to miss out on a lot of talent. I'll happily employ bright people who don't want to work for/with you.

Always problematic to assume that what works for you works for the majority.

Re: Reflections on My Career at Microsoft

#122

Post by tytso »

com2kid wrote: post #116
tytso wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many startups lose money when they are first started; and a new product may very well be losing money until it reaches a certain scale. That's not the problem. The question is what's the motivation. If the motivation is to predatory pricing, where you are deliberately holding the price below the marginal cost per unit in order to drive the competition out of business, you'll find that the FTC frowns on such behavior.…

> If the motivation is to predatory pricing, where you are deliberately holding the price below the marginal cost per unit in order to drive the competition out of business, you'll find that the FTC frowns on such behavior. Of course, but it is constantly debated line. To go back to Email, "we'll be losing money until the price for storage drops" is that predatory? "We're losing money because we haven't ramped up our…

> My understanding is that the trouble only comes if the company has actually done something illegal.

As you said earlier, "[pricing] is a constantly debated line". Suppose a search engine displays the lyrics on the results page, instead of requiring that the user click a link and go to some advertising-laden lyrics web site. Is that to improve the search user's experience, by giving them the answer right then and there? Or is it predatory move against the song lyrics web site? As you say, "it's constantly debated".

But if you have the CEO, or the product manager, saying, "I want to crush the competition; see them driven before me; and hear the lamentation of their women" (apologies to Arnold Schwarzenegger and Conan the Barbarian) you've just given a weapon to the FTC as to the intent of that "constantly debated line". And G-d help your company if that lands on the front page of the New York Times.

Also, even if you win the anti-trust lawsuit, the distraction and the legal costs are high. I'd argue that even if you ignore the toxic atmosphere argument, from a purely pragmatic and practical perspective, It's Just Not Worth It.

Want to motivate the team by asking them to build the best product ever? Sure! I'll note, by the way, that just because you have the objectively better, say, search quality score compared to all of the other search engines out there, that doesn't necessarily mean that the other search engines will go out of business. People choose which search engines to use for many reasons, and not just search quality. (Many people who use DDG admit doesn't always give the best results; but they use it because they hate Google, and it's "good enough".)

So it's actually better to come up with an objective quality metric, and constantly challenge the team to make it better, every year and every quarter, regardless of whether or not they are better than the competition. If you don't, you end up resting on your laurels, and that's no good either. So you align the whole team on making the product better, and delighting more and more users, regardless of whether or not you have the best product, and certainly not because you want to drive the competition out of business.

Take Microsoft Office, for example. For a long time it was the best, or at least most commercially successful, office suite. How do you challenge the team if your only focus is, "drive the competition out of business"? And what if your competition is the Open Source "libreoffice", which by definition can't be driven out of business, and is getting better year after year, with the end user of cost of zero dollars and zero cents staying constant?

Re: Reflections on My Career at Microsoft

#123

Post by jonfw »

inetknght wrote: post #98
FakeComments wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My experience of presenting as female online in video games is I got a lot more attention, help, and outright handouts. I want to see an actual study, because my anecdata doesn’t match the claimed experience.

You don't think that getting more attention, help, and outright handouts isn't its own form of bullying? You don't think it hints at an ever-more underlying reason behind the attention, help, and handouts?

I don't think that help and handouts is bullying, and frankly I find it amusing that somebody would argue that

Re: Reflections on My Career at Microsoft

#124

Post by user5994461 »

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #80
Someone1234 wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I strongly agree on Office/Excel. Fantastic product suite (except maybe Outlook which is long in the tooth/essentially unimproved for the last ten years). Visual Studio I'll slightly disagree on. I resent it. When VSCode, an electron application, can run lag/stutter/micro-freeze free and Visual Studio an IDE written in C++ cannot you know the codebase has become unmaintainable. This isn't a recent phenomenon either.…

I'm also not a fan of VS. From my perspective it is an overly complicated bloated software. But I think that way about quite a lot of software. However, the developers I've spoken with who love it tell me that it has some insanely good tooling that is just unmatched by anything else. I'm not even in a position to know what they're talking about or why it's so important to them, but that doesn't mean they don't know w…

For one, it has the only decent C++ debugger in existence.

Re: Reflections on My Career at Microsoft

#125

Post by damq »

repolfx wrote: post #27
Shebanator wrote: post #8

An interesting article, which I think accurately describes my brief time at Microsoft during the Ballmer era (our startup was acquired after the bubble burst). But his definition of "made men" seems very vague and very convenient. The people who Nadella appointed to higher positions were almost entirely people who had been at Microsoft for many years. Why are some "made men" and some are not? The definition seems pri…

Worse, it seems more about whether they're men at all. I got to the end and stopped reading. I thought this article was going to get into specifics of what these so called "made men" did wrong, it turned out to be a ra-ra feminist piece. I've learned the hard way these sorts of people often have very wrong and warped ideas of what makes people successful or unsuccessful so that was a disappointment. Not worth reading…

+1. I gave up reading halfway through after he complained about sexism for the tenth time without giving a single example. It seems like the author just wants to complain and doesn't really know anything about what makes a company successful. Not worth reading at all.

Re: Reflections on My Career at Microsoft

#126

Post by saagarjha »

jonfw wrote: post #123
inetknght wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't think that getting more attention, help, and outright handouts isn't its own form of bullying? You don't think it hints at an ever-more underlying reason behind the attention, help, and handouts?

I don't think that help and handouts is bullying, and frankly I find it amusing that somebody would argue that

You don't see an issue with being unable to have your in-game relationships progress past "you're a woman and that's the only thing we care about you"?

Re: Reflections on My Career at Microsoft

#128

Post by RickJWagner »

Having been a MSFT watcher through all three eras, I have to say I've been especially impressed with Satya Nadella.

I really thought the age of the web would spell Microsoft's downfall. I couldn't see past the desktop. But Satya found the cloud and brought back the mojo. Excellent move.

Re: Reflections on My Career at Microsoft

#129

Post by shantly »

bcrosby95 wrote: post #44
Baeocystin wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've felt this about Microsoft hardware, for what it's worth. I really like their mice, keyboards, and the Surface line.

Yeah, the Surface line was the first time since the original iPhone that I was actually excited about a piece of hardware.

I finally got to use one (I think it was a bottom-tier gen 2? Whatever was current at the time) about a year and a half ago when we got one for testing stuff in IE/Edge.

When I first heard of the Surface, what I thought it'd be: a bad laptop and a worse tablet.

After I read and heard people raving about how great it was for years, what I thought it'd be when I finally got to use one: a great laptop and a good-enough tablet.

What it was when I finally got to use it, very much to my surprise at that point: a bad laptop and a worse tablet.

I don't get it.

Re: Reflections on My Career at Microsoft

#130

Post by robocat »

JimboOmega wrote: post #108
Kapura wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 really can't upvote this enough. 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…

The best example of objective evidence for this I have seen is:

https://i.stuff.co.nz/business/money/96443300/the-names-the-...

Where a male and female colleague swapped names in all correspondence, and she (with a temporary male name) was astounded at how easy work was, while he (with a temporary female name) was perplexed by how much harder his job became.

And I'm guessing you have seen:

http://www.econ.nyu.edu/user/wiswall/research/schilt_wiswall...

"In 2006 American economists Kristen and Matthew Wiswall performed perhaps the ultimate test. They examined what happened to the pay of and status of employees who'd changed sex."

Post reply on HN