Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

In 8 months at Microsoft, I learned these things

ahmetalpbalkan.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 286 posts

Re: In 8 months at Microsoft, I learned these things

#31

Post by albertyw »

papercruncher wrote: post #27

I spent 5 years at Microsoft as a dev and share almost none of the author's sentiments. I had very few meetings, my manager went out of his way to make sure that I was not blocked, code reviews were mandatory, blogging on technical aspects was ok, had ample free time to work on any side project I wanted (even encouraged to work with MSR on things that were more researchy), etc etc... I could go on for a while. Sure,…

Out of curiosity, which division were you in? Given the size of Microsoft, I'm not surprised there would be some major differences between different teams.

Re: In 8 months at Microsoft, I learned these things

#32

Post by ngoel36 »

venomsnake wrote: post #19

Publishing something that HR/PR can consider slander under your real name while being junior developer is not a recipe for stable employment. These guys tend to freak out over minor stuff like that. 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 year…

I spent two summers interning as a Program Manager at Microsoft (Xbox and Office), and his statements are nearly 100% accurate:

- Literally any piece of documentation was always 1+ years out of date. Setting up a dev environment could take days when it should have only taken hours.

- A lot of my coworkers were over 35. Starkly different from my experience later at Google. Working past 6 was considered absurd, and a lot of people were perfectly happy just riding the Microsoft wave. There were plenty of engineers who had been at the company 12-18 years with only a single promotion or two.

- I actually was able to do some open source work with Codeplex

- Not a single person I worked with read HN or Reddit, that I knew of.

It's a bit depressing reading the post, but at the end of the day Microsoft was and is still an amazing place to work. I was paid well, the engineers are well taken care of, and the consumer offerings are still fun and exciting.

Although things were done differently than they are done in Silicon Valley, the difference is not necessarily bad, perhaps more eye-opening. This is how MOST computer science majors spend their careers. Not mastering MongoDB, collaborating on Google Spreadsheets, or posting things to HN, but using Windows XP, Visual Studio, and Microsoft Word 2003 on a 2008 Lenovo laptop. And MS is perfectly happy taking their money.

Re: In 8 months at Microsoft, I learned these things

#34

Post by xradionut »

I understand his experience. I've been mainly, (70% of the time), a third party Windows developer and admin for the last two decades and have spent thousands of hours working with and talking to Microsoft folks. Even have a few family members that work for the corporation.

NIH: Many Remondites live in the "bubble" where technology from the outside doesn't exist or doesn't matter. (It reminds me of the hard core Republican base.) This extends to much of the user base as well. There is a strong denial of OSS and there used to be taunting of Apple. (Until the iPhone kicked the smartphone market in gear.)

Future: Redmond has some serious issues to deal with: dysfunctional management, growing OSS usage, rejection of Win8/Xbox One and how to get people to use Azure when it's known you are the NSA's bitch.

Re: In 8 months at Microsoft, I learned these things

#35

Post by snth »

papercruncher wrote: post #27

I spent 5 years at Microsoft as a dev and share almost none of the author's sentiments. I had very few meetings, my manager went out of his way to make sure that I was not blocked, code reviews were mandatory, blogging on technical aspects was ok, had ample free time to work on any side project I wanted (even encouraged to work with MSR on things that were more researchy), etc etc... I could go on for a while. Sure,…

How long ago? Do you think it was different when you were there, that it was better in your group specifically, or that it's better in most other groups?

Re: In 8 months at Microsoft, I learned these things

#36

Post by jmduke »

ngoel36 wrote: post #32
venomsnake wrote: post #19

Publishing something that HR/PR can consider slander under your real name while being junior developer is not a recipe for stable employment. These guys tend to freak out over minor stuff like that. 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 year…

I spent two summers interning as a Program Manager at Microsoft (Xbox and Office), and his statements are nearly 100% accurate: - Literally any piece of documentation was always 1+ years out of date. Setting up a dev environment could take days when it should have only taken hours. - A lot of my coworkers were over 35. Starkly different from my experience later at Google. Working past 6 was considered absurd, and a l…

Although things were done differently than they are done in Silicon Valley, the difference is not necessarily bad, perhaps more eye-opening. This is how MOST computer science majors spend their careers. Not mastering MongoDB, collaborating on Google Spreadsheets, or posting things to HN, but using Windows XP, Visual Studio, and Microsoft Word 2003 on a 2008 Lenovo laptop. And MS is perfectly happy taking their money.

I think this is a dangerous line of logic that leads to equating 'new' with 'important.' I think once you get to the point where you judge someone for the tools they use or the sites they browse you go down a pretty negative path. It's shockingly easy to forget how much of the world runs on J2EE and ASP.net.

Re: In 8 months at Microsoft, I learned these things

#37

Post by albertyw »

mathattack wrote: post #3

"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…

My guess is this is because of the separation between engineers and product managers (PMs). Engineers are supposed to focus on development and PMs (and more businessy folks) are supposed to focus on the competition.

Re: In 8 months at Microsoft, I learned these things

#38

Post by robbiea »

venomsnake wrote: post #19

Publishing something that HR/PR can consider slander under your real name while being junior developer is not a recipe for stable employment. These guys tend to freak out over minor stuff like that. 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 year…

| Publishing something that HR/PR can consider slander under your real name while being junior developer is not a recipe for stable employment. These guys tend to freak out over minor stuff like that.

Agreed. This is not something you write publicly WHILE working for the company. I know his intentions weren't to slander the company that is paying him, but it will most likely have bad consequences within his team.

Re: In 8 months at Microsoft, I learned these things

#39

Post by mathattack »

enraged_camel wrote: post #9
philliphaydon wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find that statement hard to believe. The Azure Insiders mailing list has multiple threads mentioning other competitors such as Heroku and Rackspace.

I guess this once again proves that a lot of people simply don't read mailing list emails.

:-) Everyone's inbox gets flooded. This highlights what people self-select to ignore.

Re: In 8 months at Microsoft, I learned these things

#40

Post by mckilljoy »

As others are saying, Microsoft is a very large company with a great deal of variance in the quality and maturity of teams. I wouldn't consider this description representative.

Azure is still a comparably new team, so I'm not surprised if it is still sorting out its processes. I've hear similar descriptions of Bing teams, and other "startup" divisions in the company.

But there are definitely some brutally effective teams there that far outshine any other non-Microsoft team I've ever seen.

Post reply on HN