11–20 of 286 posts
> It is not what you do, it is what you sell.
This bothers me. Multiple companies I've worked at have made me want to work on some sort of Code Quality team to go in and rip apart and rewrite entire sections of shitty code that won't make any immediate noticeable impact. The business impact it will make is next time another programmer has to touch that code it'll take them a tenth the time to understand, use, or extend it.
The first thing he should have learned about Microsoft: every team is almost completely separate.
The windows debugger does have proper documentation. I know this because two separate people on opposite ends of Windows Org made a point to mention this. Yet the documentation itself is not more than one would expect from complex software's man page. This contrasts well with the software I am integrating with for one of my projects. The only mention I could find of said software was a slide saying "This software has no documentation, here is a link to .NET decompilation software".
One surprise I can add is that Windows does not have an internal package management system. I expected to see a apt-get like tool. Instead there are various download.com like sites hosting installers.
> Not giving back to the public domain is a norm. Uh, this is Microsoft , they may have a slightly more close-minded view of the open source movement than, say RedHat or Google, or hell, even Oracle.
http://arstechnica.com/business/2012/04/linux-kernel-in-2011...
Legal departments also get in the way of contributions to open source. "We don't want any of our proprietary code to end up in that library" is a common theme found among legal teams that paint with too-broad of brushes. I am currently experiencing this.
Pretty much every single thing in here is false for my team. The first thing he should have learned about Microsoft: every team is almost completely separate.
On average, at a big company, you're going to spend 95% of your time interacting with less than 1% of the employees.
He sounds like someone who is significantly lowering his standards. Seems like working at a big corporation is killing his spirit and energy. That is just sad. Edit: Unless he is being sarcastic?
"I am surprised that no one I met in Windows Azure team heard about Heroku or Rackspace, which are direct competitors. That’s acceptable, not everybody has to know these." WOW! It's one thing to ignore competitors, it's another to not know who they are. I thought (by reputation) that Microsoft was a competitive place. "It’s hard to find a position in corporations matches what you love to do." Seems obvious, but hinds…
I find that statement hard to believe. The Azure Insiders mailing list has multiple threads mentioning other competitors such as Heroku and Rackspace.
Lets hope it does not have negative consequences.
Otherwise familiar - these companies are like supertankers - move slowly and few people are empowered to make meaningful decisions and contributions. Worked for a few years in a telecom ... it was meetings, meetings, meetings, signing contracts with delivery dates before the day they we signed, absurd promises, turf war and NIMBY.
From now on - 20-50 person companies for me only, unless I am at the very top.
He sounds like someone who is significantly lowering his standards. Seems like working at a big corporation is killing his spirit and energy. That is just sad. Edit: Unless he is being sarcastic?
The very fact that there is so much doubt means it is not sarcastic. Or it is exceptionally poor writing.