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Working at Microsoft – Day to Day Coding

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Re: Working at Microsoft – Day to Day Coding

#71

Post by alexgartrell »

nostrademons wrote: post #33
plinkplonk wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Laptops are officially only for managers and Program managers." Heh! That's what I thought :-p Not surprised to hear MS works that way :-). Funny way to economise, making laptops status symbols. I think Google gives devs nice laptops and is probably better off for it.

The number of hours of work-from-home that Google gets out of those laptops more than justifies their cost. Hell, I'm posting this from my work laptop, taking a break from writing out a whole bunch of use cases and product design decisions.

Facebook is laptop-only[0], though I've not yet started [1] I imagine they have something similar in mind.

[0] Plus an external monitor.

[1] And from what I've read on HN, I probably won't, as they're going out of business any day now :P

Re: Working at Microsoft – Day to Day Coding

#72

Post by maximilianburke »

dikbrouwer wrote: post #13

I'm a bit confused by this post. The author seems to celebrate a private office. I strongly prefer open work spaces that you share with others, as do many companies I've worked with/seen. Care to share your opinion? I'm curious...

I've done both and much prefer offices. It's much easier to collaborate in an office than it is to drown out distracting noise from a shared workspace. Offices don't keep you from being able to swing by someone's desk or have someone drop by yours, unless you shut your door for a reason.

My current area at work is open and I have to on occasion bring ear plugs to keep the noise down to a level where I can concentrate. There are group meetings, conference calls on speakerphone, and loud personal conversations happening all the time. IMO, if it comes to needing ear plugs then the one purported benefit of working in an open area is lost since you can't really be sharing/collaborative if you've closed yourself off.

Re: Working at Microsoft – Day to Day Coding

#73

Post by SkyMarshal »

dikbrouwer wrote: post #13

I'm a bit confused by this post. The author seems to celebrate a private office. I strongly prefer open work spaces that you share with others, as do many companies I've worked with/seen. Care to share your opinion? I'm curious...

It's all explained in the book Peopleware, along with years of data to back the conclusions.

Re: Working at Microsoft – Day to Day Coding

#74

Post by InclinedPlane »

seanalltogether wrote: post #32
dikbrouwer wrote: post #13

I'm a bit confused by this post. The author seems to celebrate a private office. I strongly prefer open work spaces that you share with others, as do many companies I've worked with/seen. Care to share your opinion? I'm curious...

I'm right there with you. The informal collaboration possible in an open space is so much more productive for me.

Why do you imagine that informal collaboration isn't possible with offices? It happens all the time. Maybe you're just being prejudiced against a situation you have no experience with?

Re: Working at Microsoft – Day to Day Coding

#75

Post by kenjackson »

egor83 wrote: post #70
bmk2000 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That sucks for you. I've been working at Microsoft for about 4 years. First 2 years as a tester, and the latter 2 years as a dev (still a dev). When I was a tester, I coded 4 days a week with 1 day a week for other investigations (live site issues, meetings, etc.) As a dev, the ratio haven't changed. I still code at least 4 days a week (80% of the time) with 1 day a week for meetings, investigations, documentations,…

When I was a tester, I coded 4 days a week I'm sorry, but what's the difference between a tester and a developer then?

I suspect the type of code you write. As a dev I'd expect you to write code that ships to customers. As a tester you write test code and harnesses. Stuff the customer never directly sees.

I think I can honestly say that at ever company I've run or been a manager of influence we've had more lines of test code than product code. Yet I'm still surprised when people say "testers code?"

Re: Working at Microsoft – Day to Day Coding

#76

Post by kenjackson »

whakojacko wrote: post #64
0xEA wrote: post #51

4 PMs to 5 devs seems like overkill. why do this?

Not sure why, but from what I hear from friends at MSFT, an approximately equal number of devs, qas, and pms is very standard.

I've heard the ratio is dev::test::pm ~= 4::4::1

Re: Working at Microsoft – Day to Day Coding

#77

Post by snprbob86 »

InclinedPlane wrote: post #69
pedalpete wrote: post #2

I've never read a post by Richard before, I don't want to seem like I'm giving him a hard time, and I'm a happy Windows user, so I'm a big fan of his work. But this article isn't inspiring from a developer perspective. I've worked in a big IT department (300 people I think),as well as start-ups, so I'm not completely blind to the structures of different work environments. When Richard first mentioned that everybody h…

Microsoft treats developers very well. From offices, to hardware, to free gym memberships and health care coverage, to the idea that you're generally not expected to work more than 40 hours a week, it's all great. But that can't and doesn't replace the need for healthy corporate culture and good, intelligent, pragmatic leadership, a lot of which has increasingly been lacking at MS. You'll have a quad core desktop wit…

I was at Microsoft for two internships and two fulltime years. I never once had an office to myself, I always had to share. In fact, the new Studios buildings are almost entirely "6 packs" of cubicles.

As for hardware, if you really needed it we were able to get it, but there was a fair bit of scavenging for spare parts to power build/test machines. There was also a shortage of Xbox and especially Win Phone dev kits.

My day to day coding experience varied wildly by task. Some stuff had a 2 minute turnaround, most stuff 2 hours, and some stuff several days.

The politics, infighting, and Redmond isolationism are all very real, and very painful.

That said, the company is huge, so experiences differ broadly across the various orgs.

Re: Working at Microsoft – Day to Day Coding

#78

Post by rdouble »

dikbrouwer wrote: post #13

I'm a bit confused by this post. The author seems to celebrate a private office. I strongly prefer open work spaces that you share with others, as do many companies I've worked with/seen. Care to share your opinion? I'm curious...

I've worked at startups with open plans for the past 12 years. At every one, it starts out ok when there are less than 10 people. As soon as there's about 20, almost all of the important programming work is done after hours when all the loud people are no longer there. The only thing that gets done during the day (programming wise) is putting out fires. I've come to the conclusion that half the reason startups require "insane hours" is because during the day, the programmers are distracted and only working at 20% capacity.

Re: Working at Microsoft – Day to Day Coding

#79

Post by snprbob86 »

kenjackson wrote: post #8
jessedhillon wrote: post #5

Earlier 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.

My team (XNA Game Studio) had App Week once or twice each year. By far my favorite time spent at Microsoft.

The XNA team is full of ex-game developers because working on platforms at Microsoft has much better "work life balance" than game studios. The stuff that I, and the other team members, created were always cool/fun/hilarious/weird/etc. It was like a week long game jam ending with a Friday afternoon "Think and Drink" where everyone showed off their creations and talked about the good, the bad, and the ugly of our own technology through their App Week experiences.

Re: Working at Microsoft – Day to Day Coding

#80

Post by tallanvor »

InclinedPlane wrote: post #69
pedalpete wrote: post #2

I've never read a post by Richard before, I don't want to seem like I'm giving him a hard time, and I'm a happy Windows user, so I'm a big fan of his work. But this article isn't inspiring from a developer perspective. I've worked in a big IT department (300 people I think),as well as start-ups, so I'm not completely blind to the structures of different work environments. When Richard first mentioned that everybody h…

Microsoft treats developers very well. From offices, to hardware, to free gym memberships and health care coverage, to the idea that you're generally not expected to work more than 40 hours a week, it's all great. But that can't and doesn't replace the need for healthy corporate culture and good, intelligent, pragmatic leadership, a lot of which has increasingly been lacking at MS. You'll have a quad core desktop wit…

In the office I work out of only managers have private offices. There are also a few small offices with 2-4 people, but most work in groups of 6-10.
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