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Working at Microsoft – Day to Day Coding

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Re: Working at Microsoft – Day to Day Coding

#161

Post by BCM43 »

pragmatic wrote: post #140
seldo wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. R…

I can run a fully featured Linux system on a 800mhz laptop with 1gb of ram.

Re: Working at Microsoft – Day to Day Coding

#162

Post by kooshball »

jdp23 wrote: post #136
thaumaturgy wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

you seriously think devs will do a better job daily if they have a slower machine for day to day tasks?

Re: Working at Microsoft – Day to Day Coding

#163

Post by nostrademons »

astrange wrote: post #139
nostrademons wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

At the moment, confidential. Google derives a competitive advantage from being fast.

I've toyed with the idea of getting permission to release some of the results we've discovered, in maybe a blog series like what Crockford did for JavaScript at Yahoo. Google also derives a strategic advantage from the rest of the web being fast, and IMHO the benefits of making everyone else fast outweigh the benefits of being faster than everyone else. But I've already got a 20% project that takes up like 50% of my time, so I don't have time to organize something like that. Maybe later.

Re: Working at Microsoft – Day to Day Coding

#164

Post by thaumaturgy »

encoderer wrote: post #155
thaumaturgy wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I can see where you're going but it sounds to me like the entrepreneurial spirit in you has done what it tends to do in all of us: Look for a way to make lemons into lemonade. But my perspective is that I would probably prefer not to have those particular lemons! My time is valuable to me, and so is my patience. And as a software developer, I spend far more time using other peoples software (IDE, DB clients, etc) tha…

Working with end-users all the time has changed my attitude about how valuable developer time is. It's not that I don't think developer time is valuable, it's that I've really seen, with my own eyes, just how many people are affected when developers value their own time more highly than they value their customers' time. All those little inefficiencies and minor bugs and other problems really add up quick.

I, personally, am far less inclined now to spend my coding time on new features, and more likely to spend it on refining what I already have -- and so far I've gotten really positive feedback from customers on that.

Re: Working at Microsoft – Day to Day Coding

#165

Post by thaumaturgy »

Duff wrote: post #145
thaumaturgy wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This is an 80/20 rule thing. The vast majority of PCs get refreshed in one way or another every 3-4 years. So a company like Microsoft can invest in the 80% of the market that drives sales (ie. people who refresh computers) OR invest resources in solving problems for the 20% of people running old hardware with an old OS they bought a long time ago. Should the state of the art be driven by the fact that your employer…

The very next thing my company is going to do after rolling out the product currently under development is start aggressively collecting and compiling statistics on all of our support issues, service calls, and our customers' systems.

Even accounting for business clients on hiring binges, I'm really, really certain that the vast majority of the PCs that we support are more than 4 years old.

Re: Working at Microsoft – Day to Day Coding

#166

Post by thaumaturgy »

kooshball wrote: post #162
jdp23 wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

you seriously think devs will do a better job daily if they have a slower machine for day to day tasks?

This is an interesting question, because it implies that commodity hardware isn't good enough for day to day tasks.

If that's true, do you think the software developers have done a good job?

And if that's not true, then why shouldn't they use commodity hardware?

Re: Working at Microsoft – Day to Day Coding

#167

Post by prodigal_erik »

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 don't mean to sound like I'm chaining myself to the oars, and it's all a matter of degree. Talking design or shooting the breeze with the other guys is great and all, but sometimes I already know what I need to build if only everyone would just let me keep it in my head long enough to get anywhere on it. I find Joel's "15 minutes" optimistic. When a dozen people need immediate answers about stuff I haven't thought about since last year, and I try and fail a dozen times to actually write some code only to go home exhausted without a single commit to my name, it's utterly demoralizing. I go out of my way to respect others' time in the zone as an overreaction to how rarely mine is.

Re: Working at Microsoft – Day to Day Coding

#168

Post by JanezStupar »

jdp23 wrote: post #133
nostrademons wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

See nobody is disputing what all of us claim here.

But it's the usual perception of majority of companies that engineering, product development,... are cost centers and cost centers need to be minimized to gain profit.

It's what you get when you let the beancounters run the business. But people bitching here that developers at MS don't have it well off - are being ignorant about majority of industry where developers are still being under-utilized to everyones dismay.

And Microsoft's care of intellectual workers is top tier. Even the ones that are not well off (sitting in a room with 10 other people) are better off than 90% of our industry.

Indeed some people get to have anything they want or need - good for them. Even better if it makes the end result better. It's good that they don't get into situation as I have in multiple occasions - running a top priority, code red development effort which if fails it will take the company down, and then when I needed a new virtual appliance I got informed that I cannot get is since the ESX is out of harddrives and that there will be no purchases since the budged has already been spent.

And this is the industry standard - not the "I run bazillion node supercluster".

Hell where I used to work - two of the interns went and bought 2 24" monitors each out of their own money to use them at work.

Re: Working at Microsoft – Day to Day Coding

#169

Post by geedee77 »

X-Istence wrote: post #24
kenjackson wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've worked in both environments. Honestly, the best environment, IMO, is working from home -- office is second. Shared office spaces are a distant fourth. I'm the type of person who needs a lot of solitude at some times, and at other times, I love to blast music, pace, juggle, and gorge on chips. When I need the solitude, when I'm in the zone, I don't want you taking a call from your gf, or deciding with some other…

I guess I am lucky, I can spend some time looking like I am screwing around or doing mundane tasks so long as I get my work done on time.

This is the exact opposite to me. I spend my full day working, hit (or better) all deadlines, come in about 2 hours early and I still get grief from the big boss for leaving on-time!
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