4 PMs to 5 devs seems like overkill. why do this?
Working at Microsoft – Day to Day Coding
51–60 of 171 posts
Re: Working at Microsoft – Day to Day Coding
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
You never ask people questions when coding?
I am not opposed to all questions. I am opposed to the questions that are typically asked by those who prefer open spaces. I am also not opposed to basic questions asked by those who are new to the field, but I am often asked basic questions by those with 3+ years of experience. Read a book.
It's possible we just know different people who prefer open spaces, but the questions I'm frequently asked are more specific variations on "How does Google's serving and indexing pipeline work?" and "What are the best practices for building JavaScript-heavy webapps in an environment where latency matters?"
There are obviously no books about those topics (well, there are some about the latter, but they're all wrong, and we have experimental data to prove it). And even if they were, they'd be out of date before they were published. Google's indexing system changed completely when Caffeine was launched last year - the only way to get information about it is to ask the people who're responsible for developing it. And the ecosystem surrounding the web is continually changing, and we keep running new experiments to keep up with it, because things that we were absolutely certain were true 5 years ago no longer are.
Re: Working at Microsoft – Day to Day Coding
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
When the first few lines tell me about how surprised I will be, I expected to hear that people are encouraged to be creative, take risks, try working on project that might end up going nowhere -- in other words, that they promote a hacker culture. Unfortunately, the things that the author focused on are not inspiring. Being able to paint your office? Great, but how about week-long hackathons where people can code on…
I have heard that people at MS do something called "app week". This appears to be a week between milestones where you take a week to build something that can be built in a week. Usually just tangentially related to their product. Maybe this author can talk about that at some point.
Again very dependent on the team. I've been in teams which specifically carved out time for this and also been in teams where prototyping/building crazy stuff was something you did all the time.
Re: Working at Microsoft – Day to Day Coding
#54Reading this almost makes me want to cry. It's still all to common these days to find developers with 4 year old machines, comprised of scavanged parts (from people leaving) running Windows XP. A level of bureaucracy forcing you to maintain 3 tickets (at least) in 3 different systems to make even a typo fix in a production system with 3 day minimum turn around time. Servers with less RAM and resources then your 4 yea…
What about new machines running Windows XP? That's just sad.
Re: Working at Microsoft – Day to Day Coding
#55"Most people in Windows have a private office – with a door" At my office we've made an effort to keep our workspace communal to the point of removing the 12" dividers that were included with our work tables. This, as you might guess, does result in some distraction but in fostering the relationships at the office people are more apt to like being there. I'm curious how other large companies and startups handle this.…
Do your developers have to do any creative work, requiring deep thought, or are they just code monkeys? If the former, do you provide a way for them to get away from the distraction when they need to think deeply?
I work in an open space. The office has some secluded spots with couches that people can go to with their laptops to work without distraction. They can also attempt to steal an unused meeting room if they need complete isolation.
Re: Working at Microsoft – Day to Day Coding
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not really a status symbol. PMs tend to be more mobile, presenting in meetings and such, and need laptops. Devs and testers get much better desktops.
"It's not really a status symbol." A status symbol is, by definition, something only or mostly upper echelons of a hierarchy can get, with fig leaf justifications about why the folks on the lower rungs are "not worthy" of them. The surest way to make anything (a private office, a parking space, a laptop) a status symbol is to mandate that only people above a certain level in the hierarchy can get one.(Note that I am…
Everything done at MSFT is based upon dev-test-pm triads where all members of the team have equal say in the product and decisions. This is true from the individual contributor level up to the VP level (where it starts to break down). Dev's report to dev leads, test to test leads, and PMs to PM leads. All PMs, including individual contributors, get laptops. They are the same level as developers, and more importantly, in a completely different hierarchy.
I'm not going to lie and say devs don't want laptops - of course they do. Everyone wants a free laptop. But guess what? I'm a PM at MSFT, and you know what I want? A second desktop and better monitors. Are these a status symbols for devs? No. Resources are fairly assigned based on need, and everyone at the company realizes that.
I should also point out that most senior devs do have laptops in my experience. It's the really new, junior guys that don't get them right away. There are communal resources if a dev really needs portability for a few days.
Re: Working at Microsoft – Day to Day Coding
#57Reading this almost makes me want to cry. It's still all to common these days to find developers with 4 year old machines, comprised of scavanged parts (from people leaving) running Windows XP. A level of bureaucracy forcing you to maintain 3 tickets (at least) in 3 different systems to make even a typo fix in a production system with 3 day minimum turn around time. Servers with less RAM and resources then your 4 yea…
And for me, it hilighted some of what I've suspected for a while is wrong with Windows development.
I own a small company that handles a lot of end-users' various issues. Although I spend most of my time now coding, I spent more than my fair share of time working one-on-one with individuals and companies that were having problems with their systems. I still spend around 10 hours a week doing it.
My primary development machine is an aging laptop that can't even play YouTube videos any more without stuttering. I hate almost every minute of using it. It's slow, and limited, and it hangs.
So when I write something, I write it to work well on that laptop, because I know there are lots -- lots -- of people out there with similar old hardware, and to say they're frustrated with computers is an understatement.
How could a Windows developer possibly understand just how frustrating their product is when they spend all of their time using the most powerful hardware available?
How could they possibly understand that Windows file sharing in a mixed environment running SBS 2008 is still complete and miserable and utter garbage, when they're running on a network that hides those kinds of issues?
Their development process is great for their developers. No argument there, and I'm totally and unabashedly envious.
It's also terrible and completely wrong for most of their many users.
Re: Working at Microsoft – Day to Day Coding
#58An assumption? We've been told pretty directly how complicated the process is (often with pride). See the 14 steps which turn a 5 minute code change into a multi-man-month-mammoth: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ericlippert/archive/2003/10/28/53298... Or the now infamous Windows Shutdown "crapfest": http://moishelettvin.blogspot.com/2006/11/windows-shutdown-c... There's more. And I have no problem with the author stating ho…
This blog post is mainly about the tools developers use day-to-day while they're in coding mode. Tools and development processes do tend to be well thought out and efficient at MS. That's not really related to the organizational dynamics that come into play for planning products and features. That tends to be complicated, involving a lot of people, meetings, and debate. (I'm not defending it, just saying that's how i…
I don't mean to drag this out, since I largely agree with what you are saying, and it's true that the OP seems to focus on that.
However, his intro blurb specifically says that we are wrong in assuming that writing software is a "soul-crushing bureaucratic exercise." Which, as you point out, the post never really says anything more about.
Re: Working at Microsoft – Day to Day Coding
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
I am not opposed to all questions. I am opposed to the questions that are typically asked by those who prefer open spaces. I am also not opposed to basic questions asked by those who are new to the field, but I am often asked basic questions by those with 3+ years of experience. Read a book.
It's possible we just know different people who prefer open spaces, but the questions I'm frequently asked are more specific variations on "How does Google's serving and indexing pipeline work?" and "What are the best practices for building JavaScript-heavy webapps in an environment where latency matters?" There are obviously no books about those topics (well, there are some about the latter, but they're all wrong, a…
Most companies are nothing like Google.
Re: Working at Microsoft – Day to Day Coding
#60The author seems to be pounding his chest about how efficient the MSFT code world is, but I was struck by how inefficient it all seemed. Is that just me?