Working at Microsoft – Day to Day Coding • Hacker News Board

Re: Working at Microsoft – Day to Day Coding

#131

Post by kenjackson » Mon, Feb 28, 2011, 2:48 PM UTC

plinkplonk wrote: post #104

JanezStupar wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

That sounds very cost ineffective. I'd be more productive with a personal helicopter with landing pads in various locations with an oncall pilot... but the productivity benefit is probably not worth the cost.

All organizations need to be cost efficient... unless you're a govt agency or contractor. In which case being cost INefficient is actually rational.

Re: Working at Microsoft – Day to Day Coding

#132

Post by singular » Mon, Feb 28, 2011, 2:56 PM UTC

artmageddon wrote: post #130

singular wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Still there. Contributing to OSS (golang) + studying theory I missed because I didn't do compsci at uni. Once I hit the 40/50 patch count and have good algo/os knowledge I reckon I should be better placed to be attractive job-wise. Several failed 'views have seriously hit my confidence, but I am working on fixing obvious areas of deficiency. A lot of the problem is that the stuff you build can't necessarily happen at…

I'm hitting 29 in a few months and am more or less in the same boat. Keep fighting the good fight.

Amen brother. Drop me a mail if you want... always good to have solidarity in this kind of situation.

Re: Working at Microsoft – Day to Day Coding

#133

Post by jdp23 » Mon, Feb 28, 2011, 3:15 PM UTC

nostrademons wrote: post #108

JanezStupar wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 h…

Exactly. Unless a company's in such bad shape that they have to nickel-and-dime on expenses, the value of productive (and happy!) employees far outweighs hardware costs.

Re: Working at Microsoft – Day to Day Coding

#134

Post by jdp23 » Mon, Feb 28, 2011, 3:23 PM UTC

The "individual offices" aspect is interesting. Back in the 1980s and early 1990s, when Microsoft went from success to success and the corporate culture got really established, software engineering research showed that developers were more effective with individual offices and big monitors.

By 2005/2006, when I was looking at corporate culture at MS, things had changed: with the advent of pair programming and agile methods, many designers and developers are more effective in shared spaces -- and many prefer those environments. NOT cubicle farms, which are the worst of all world, and NOT large badly-designed open-spaces ... but there are plenty of other good options.

However, "individual offices" for devs is now such a status symbol for the teams that still have them, that people at the management level are very unwilling to change. One designer I know spent literally a year trying to get permission to get his 12-person team into an open space. In the end he gave up and eventually left the company.

Re: Working at Microsoft – Day to Day Coding

#135

Post by artmageddon » Mon, Feb 28, 2011, 3:26 PM UTC

singular wrote: post #132

artmageddon wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm hitting 29 in a few months and am more or less in the same boat. Keep fighting the good fight.

Amen brother. Drop me a mail if you want... always good to have solidarity in this kind of situation.

Definitely-expect one later tonight!

Re: Working at Microsoft – Day to Day Coding

#136

Post by jdp23 » Mon, Feb 28, 2011, 3:26 PM UTC

thaumaturgy wrote: post #57

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…

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 developmen…

Very very true.

The ideal situation would be a blazingly fast machine for compiling, linking, and running automated tests ... and commodity hardware for day-to-day tasks including browsing, email, word processing, spreadsheeting.

Re: Working at Microsoft – Day to Day Coding

#137

Post by alecco » Mon, Feb 28, 2011, 3:34 PM UTC

boyter wrote: post #109

jasonkester wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Avoid the Watercooler Gang

http://web.archive.org/web/20080502192810/http://www.gapingv...

Move on ASAP.

Re: Working at Microsoft – Day to Day Coding

#138

Post by plinkplonk » Mon, Feb 28, 2011, 3:37 PM UTC

kenjackson wrote: post #131

plinkplonk wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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…

That sounds very cost ineffective. I'd be more productive with a personal helicopter with landing pads in various locations with an oncall pilot... but the productivity benefit is probably not worth the cost. All organizations need to be cost efficient... unless you're a govt agency or contractor. In which case being cost INefficient is actually rational.

"That sounds very cost ineffective."

What specifically sounds "cost ineffective"?

3000 node clusters? That is a tiny cluster as clusters go. 7 quad core machines? Two ThinkPads? A million dollars on one-of-a-kind hardware?

You my friend, have zero clue in this. Since you have no idea what the specific cost benefit analysis on this project is that statement is built on nothing but your prejudices. I grant that it may "sound" ineffective to someone with no experience working on such projects. If I were to blather about whether a drug development proposal (something about which I know next to nothing) is "cost effective" without even looking at the financial documentation, I'd come close to what you are doing with that statement.

"I'd be more productive with a personal helicopter with landing pads in various locations with an oncall pilot"

In the right situation, expensing a personal helicopter would be trivial. What is "cost effective" depends on the derived benefit. Applies to startups too. The cost depends on the benefit derived not on what the raw materials cost.

So (fwiw, I could care less about convincing you) It is not really "cost ineffective". Machine/networking etc costs on this project are trivial compared to the total budget (spent on other resources) and (much) more importantly the derived benefit.

(just making up an example since I can't talk about what this project really does) If you were able to decrypt, and classify (in the Machine Learning sense) all enemy communication in real time, how much is that capability worth to a nation? Worth spending a few millions on? Not every project in the world has the financial structure of two guys in a garage coding up the next silly web app.

Iow you are talking about "unknown unknowns" with nothing to back up your conclusions. Amusing but not really relevant.

Re: Working at Microsoft – Day to Day Coding

#139

Post by astrange » Mon, Feb 28, 2011, 3:42 PM UTC

nostrademons wrote: post #52

absconditus wrote: post #49

Earlier 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…

> What are the best practices for building JavaScript-heavy webapps in an environment where latency matters?

Well, what are they?

Re: Working at Microsoft – Day to Day Coding

#140

Post by pragmatic » Mon, Feb 28, 2011, 3:43 PM UTC

seldo wrote: post #82

InclinedPlane wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think that's actually the problem. Windows (and many other MS groups) have quite excellent performance and integration testing. They generally do a good job of keeping performance under control. I think the biggest problem is how they approach performance as a test signoff criteria, usually, rather than as a budgeted line-item with goals for improvement. As to situations like what you describe with file shari…

Treating performance as a minimum bar that has to be met rather than a goal in and of itself sounds exactly like the kind of development process that would produce Windows -- which always feels sluggish if you're using anything other than the latest hardware. I don't think Microsoft realizes how enormously performance contributes to user dissatisfaction with their OS. As a web developer, I know that adding just a sec…

Consider that you can go to Bestbuy (or your local computer retailer or choice) and buy a $500 laptop capable of running Windows 7. A Mac is 2 to 5 times that. (Highest price PC at Bestbuy $1200, highest priced Mac ~$2200) (Macbook is $1000, pc is $300-$500).

I installed Windows 7 on 2 laptops of family members. These laptops were $300 from Walmart. Windows 7 runs just fine.

I installed Windows 7 on an Asus EEE pc. Runs about as well as Windows XP (only computer where I can tell it runs a littler slower).

Considering a ~$800 ipad that isn't a full computer...

I fail to grasp what kind of performance you expect to get out of Windows 7, while at the same time having a full featured OS at the same time running on _affordable_ hardware.