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Working at Microsoft – Day to Day Coding

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Re: Working at Microsoft – Day to Day Coding

#101

Post by nostrademons »

lovskogen wrote: post #67
nostrademons wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What do you do over at Google?

Very broadly, Search Features. I worked on the visual redesign that launched last May, and before that some of the search tools (particularly Wonder Wheel and Related Searches) and a bit on the move from having separate search properties (books.google.com, blogs.google.com, video.google.com, etc.) to a single search app. Then I spent about 6 months doing some infrastructure stuff with the webserver, and I'm now doing some feature work that's in the early stages of the project.

Re: Working at Microsoft – Day to Day Coding

#102

Post by jasonkester »

boyter wrote: post #9

Reading 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…

Don't sweat it. We all worked there for a couple years.

It's called "getting experience", and the key is to remember you're supposed to move on after you've built enough stuff to demonstrate your worth to the next place. This is what the beginning of everybody's development career looks like.

Grit your teeth and get through it. It gets good later on.

Re: Working at Microsoft – Day to Day Coding

#103

Post by JanezStupar »

plinkplonk wrote: post #61
DaveMebs wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

"I'm a PM at MSFT, and you know what I want? A second desktop and better monitors." If you want them to do your job and you are not getting them, that just illustrates the point better. Economizing on hardware (and paper towels, heh!) is really dumb for a software/tech company. "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 a…

So what you're saying is that where you work everybody has 2 desktops, 2 laptops and nobody would raise a brow if you wanted another?

In my book what Microsoft does is waaaaay beyond "trying to save on toilet paper". The last place I worked having a monitor bigger than 19" was a status simbol.

Excuse my patronizing - you are around/under 25 right? Because I have noticed that juniors tend to have this petty fascination with hardware that goes away with time (myself included).

Re: Working at Microsoft – Day to Day Coding

#104

Post by plinkplonk »

JanezStupar wrote: post #103
plinkplonk wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"I'm a PM at MSFT, and you know what I want? A second desktop and better monitors." If you want them to do your job and you are not getting them, that just illustrates the point better. Economizing on hardware (and paper towels, heh!) is really dumb for a software/tech company. "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 a…

So what you're saying is that where you work everybody has 2 desktops, 2 laptops and nobody would raise a brow if you wanted another? In my book what Microsoft does is waaaaay beyond "trying to save on toilet paper". The last place I worked having a monitor bigger than 19" was a status simbol. Excuse my patronizing - you are around/under 25 right? Because I have noticed that juniors tend to have this petty fascinatio…

"what you're saying is that where you work everybody has 2 desktops, 2 laptops and nobody would raise a brow if you wanted another?"

I work on a 3000 node super computing cluster doing heavy duty Machine Learning and signal processing and a lot of funky (and classified) hardware, and yes, no one would blink if I wanted two more machines (or a 100 more) - as a matter of fact we recently did a million$ + upgrade of the hardware on my say so, so yeah everyone on this project gets all the hardware they want ;-)

Looking around I see (my personal system, doing mostly rendering and reports) 7 quad core machines, three 27 in monitors, 2 laptops, both Thinkpads. I (literally) only have to ask to get more machines.

"Excuse my patronizing - you are around/under 25 right?"

Patronizing is always inexcusable and rude, and snark appropriate on reddit isnot so valued on HN, but I don't mind at all. When you say things like that you just make a fool of yourself in public, go right ahead. :-)

And as for my age, I am closer to 40 than 25, so perhaps you just need to try again? ;-)

EDIT: (btw "paper towels" != "toilet paper". You missed the reference This which wrt the benefits cuts in 2004which included stopping towel supply(later rescinded) - I confess I am only guessing the towels were paper. ;-)

from mini msft (I heard from a friend in MS, but mini is an online reference)

"Should have just done the towels and called it a day!" - Lisa Brummel, May 18th 2006.

You know, one moment of reflection: the circle is now complete. My second post to this blog was on July 6th, 2004. It was right after an impromptu employee meeting with Ballmer and Gates and as part of that, Mr. Ballmer justified the unfortunate recent benefit cuts, the main two points of ire being the towels and the ESPP revamp. Now, two years later, we're getting our towels back.

Has it always just been about the towels?

(Possible book title flashes through my mind.)

It's not like we're sweaty work-out animals always in need of a shower and fresh towel. No. What riled us was the bone-headed way the towel cut-back was handled, explained, and justified. It truly made us wonder just who are these people in charge and just who do they think they are leading? The towels became the symbol of poor leadership. That and the office-supply hide-and-seek.

Someone should send Ms. Brummel a golden towel award. I'd like my old ESPP back, too."

Re: Working at Microsoft – Day to Day Coding

#105

Post by danenania »

prodigal_erik wrote: post #65
nostrademons wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You never ask people questions when coding?

My favorite argument comes from http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000068.html : "Mutt can't remember the name of the Unicode version of the strcpy function. He could look it up, which takes 30 seconds, or he could ask Jeff, which takes 15 seconds. Since he's sitting right next to Jeff, he asks Jeff. Jeff gets distracted and loses 15 minutes of productivity (to save Mutt 15 seconds)." If a question isn't a…

"fucking up their day"

This is interesting--I would never feel this strongly about being interrupted unless someone was being overtly rude or annoying. I want to be productive, but I don't feel obligated to plow forward relentlessly hour after hour. If someone breaks my flow to ask a reasonable question, I don't think of it as a big deal. I think true flow is a lot less fragile than many give it credit for. It doesn't vanish anytime a pin drops nearby.

I think there's something to be said for the benefits of a less serious and more relaxed mindset. Working steadily, but not getting all caught up in "how productive am I?" like you're an assembly line robot. Coding is as much an art as a job and often you can be more productive by playing ping pong and chatting for 6 hours then having an insight that saves you 100 hours in the long run because your mind makes a lateral leap about the architecture that almost definitely wouldn't have happened if you had just sat at your desk typing all day.

I still see the benefits of private offices because it can be very beneficial to have the option of silence and intense focus when that is what you need to get over a hump, but it also seems like a lot of programmers are missing the great potential rewards of real creative collaboration--probably because they are used to collaborating in an uptight business-guy kind of way. Instead, they should take a cue from other creative people like artists, poets, and musicians, and allow their minds be free a good portion time through relaxation, speaking freely, and gasp having plenty of thoroughly unproductive fun. The gains in inspiration will easily outweigh the lack of perspiration, and life will become more enjoyable to boot. Isn't that ultimately the point of all this toil anyway?

Re: Working at Microsoft – Day to Day Coding

#106

Post by paulcam »

sriramk wrote: post #34
checoivan wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Laptops are officially only for managers and Program managers. As a dev/test you can get a loaner for a presentation or find one, somehow.

5-year Microsoftie here (mostly PM, some dev) Sorry - I don't think that's true. When I was a dev I had a laptop. It is highly dependent on the team you work for. I know a lot of devs who have laptops. In fact, most things hardware related are highly related to the team you work for. Since MSFT works on such a variety of things, hardware needs tends to vary dramatically

9 year softie here (Shell Test in my early days, now doing Dev work)

Indeed everything is dependent on need. PMs always get laptops because they spend lots of time outside of their office. On my team, most dev leads are also issued laptops. Friends of mine in teams closer to laptop features (think Windows 7 touch input, for example) never have had problems getting a laptop. On my current team, it's not common for an IC dev to have a laptop. It's also not common to find an IC dev with a machine more than 8 months old. I haven't quite figured out what everyone else's fascination is with laptops. I bought one for my own personal use, brought it to work, and then stopped bringing it because it just sat on my desk doing nothing 95% of the time. The other 5% I've replaced with post-it notes which, I'm happy to say, are available to both PM and Dev.

Re: Working at Microsoft – Day to Day Coding

#107

Post by paulcam »

DaveMebs wrote: post #56
plinkplonk wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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,…

> It's the really new, junior guys that don't get them right away.

I've been at MSFT for 9 years and have yet to be issued a laptop. I've been MSFT for 9 years and have yet to actually need a laptop. :)

Re: Working at Microsoft – Day to Day Coding

#108

Post by nostrademons »

JanezStupar wrote: post #103
plinkplonk wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"I'm a PM at MSFT, and you know what I want? A second desktop and better monitors." If you want them to do your job and you are not getting them, that just illustrates the point better. Economizing on hardware (and paper towels, heh!) is really dumb for a software/tech company. "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 a…

So what you're saying is that where you work everybody has 2 desktops, 2 laptops and nobody would raise a brow if you wanted another? In my book what Microsoft does is waaaaay beyond "trying to save on toilet paper". The last place I worked having a monitor bigger than 19" was a status simbol. Excuse my patronizing - you are around/under 25 right? Because I have noticed that juniors tend to have this petty fascinatio…

My personal setup is 3 24" monitors, 2 quad-core desktops, and a ThinkPad laptop, backed up by a few tens of thousands of machines sitting off in a datacenter somewhere. With what they're paying me, they could afford my total hardware setup with less than a month of salary, and it's saved me far more time than that. I use basically all of it - all 3 monitors are usually covered with windows, and it's not unusual to have 4-6 webservers running on my desktops.

I'm older than 25, though probably not as old as plinkplonk.

Re: Working at Microsoft – Day to Day Coding

#109

Post by boyter »

jasonkester wrote: post #102
boyter wrote: post #9

Reading 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…

Don't sweat it. We all worked there for a couple years. It's called "getting experience", and the key is to remember you're supposed to move on after you've built enough stuff to demonstrate your worth to the next place. This is what the beginning of everybody's development career looks like. Grit your teeth and get through it. It gets good later on.

I guess thats where I am now. Three years and it might be time to look towards something else. Cheers for making me feel better about it though.

Re: Working at Microsoft – Day to Day Coding

#110

Post by nostrademons »

danenania wrote: post #105
prodigal_erik wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My favorite argument comes from http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000068.html : "Mutt can't remember the name of the Unicode version of the strcpy function. He could look it up, which takes 30 seconds, or he could ask Jeff, which takes 15 seconds. Since he's sitting right next to Jeff, he asks Jeff. Jeff gets distracted and loses 15 minutes of productivity (to save Mutt 15 seconds)." If a question isn't a…

"fucking up their day" This is interesting--I would never feel this strongly about being interrupted unless someone was being overtly rude or annoying. I want to be productive, but I don't feel obligated to plow forward relentlessly hour after hour. If someone breaks my flow to ask a reasonable question, I don't think of it as a big deal. I think true flow is a lot less fragile than many give it credit for. It doesn'…

I'll admit to sometimes getting annoyed when I'm interrupted and lose my train of thought. I like to code, damnit, it's hard when something keeps me from coding. :-/

But I've also found that my stress level just dropped so much when I acknowledged that I get nothing done during business hours, and so ought to just go in and accept the fact that my job is to help other people get things done. I can still fit in 2-3 hours after dinner, once everyone's gone home, and I found when I was doing my startup that 3 hours is about the maximum time per sitting that one can spend doing high-level intellectually creative work without getting totally burnt out. The unfortunate part is that it time-shifts my day (I go in to work around 1:00 PM and work till 9 or 10 at night), which means I only see the sun for half the day. But with enough practice (obviously failing now, since it's almost 3:00 AM), maybe I could swing my sleep schedule around and just have the mornings off to do whatever I want, then go to sleep as soon as I get home from work.

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