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In 8 months at Microsoft, I learned these things

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

#121

Post by venomsnake »

mbell wrote: post #112
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 The truth can not under any reasonable definition be considered slander.

And HR and PR departments in any company have always been the pinnacle of reasonableness

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

#122

Post by JonFish85 »

The biggest thing that sticks out to me is that if you expected to spend more than 3 hours a day writing code as opposed to simply thinking about it / studying it / discussing it / debugging it, you may have been misguided on what a coding job would be. I've only worked on relatively small-headcount projects, and even when the only code in the repo was my own, most of my time is spent debugging things, reading datasheets and discussing design choices with others. Actual writing of new code is fairly minimal, especially after the point in the project where you're making feature changes & additions. It takes a lot of time to figure out what to change without breaking everything!

I have to imagine that a job that allows for 8-10 hours of pure coding (not debugging, not discussing design, etc) every day has a boatload of half-finished-but-not-operational projects sitting around, waiting to be tested & completed.

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

#123

Post by scotty79 »

> I have seen the knowledge inside the company is mostly transferred by talking and hands-on sessions.

Yes. Exactly. IMHO this is the factor that's responsible for at least 50% of corporate clumsiness.

> If this would have been my own company there would be tons of wiki pages.

Just having wikis won't help much. I worked at a company that had wiki, people were putting things there as an afterthought. I was total and complete mess. Lot's of information was outdated, duplicated, horribly messy but it still was something. There should probable be some person with sense of structure to prune those pages, nag people about details, construct some sort of tree from these splinters of information.

Corporation also had task tracking system. But it wasn't helping. It was used as afterthought to leave a trace that some work is to be done and some work was done. What's actually to be done was passed via face to face contact. Therefore noone cared about task tracking system and what's written there.

If you want to keep information, you have to use the system that stores it as crucial (only?) communication chanel.

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

#124

Post by coldtea »

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.

That's to me the equivalent of saying: "sitting on the front of the bus, as a black person, is a recipe for trouble".

Not in the sense that it's racist, of course.

But that it trivialises a problematic situation, and asks for caution from the (potential) victim.

It's not what he did that's problematic, it's the very notion that a company would consider firing someone over sharing something as innocent and truthful as this.

And that we should somehow "accept it" and just "be cautious" not to have this happen to us.

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

#125

Post by JonFish85 »

scotty79 wrote: post #123

> I have seen the knowledge inside the company is mostly transferred by talking and hands-on sessions. Yes. Exactly. IMHO this is the factor that's responsible for at least 50% of corporate clumsiness. > If this would have been my own company there would be tons of wiki pages. Just having wikis won't help much. I worked at a company that had wiki, people were putting things there as an afterthought. I was total and c…

Wikis for documentation: great in theory, sucks in practice.

Make a change to source, then you have to figure out where the wiki page is for it. Can't find the wiki page? Make a new one. What folder does it go in? Do you make a new folder? What if a page does exist, but it's wrong? Do you fix the whole thing? Just the part you added? Email the person who last updated it?

After 6 months it ends up being a tangled mess of insanity, and no one relies on it. You complain about outdated/indescipherable comments? Imagine that multiplied out. In fact, it's almost worse; at least with code you can try to think like a compiler and figure it out. Without code--yikes!

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

#126

Post by andrewflnr »

spiderPig wrote: post #107
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,…

Also, worthwhile to note that this guy is an SDET and not an SDE at Microsoft. VAST difference in quality between the two disciplines.

T for testing?

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

#127

Post by coldtea »

rmah wrote: post #119

I'm not sure where to start. This is a person at his first job out of college and he's been there for less than a year (two if we're being generous). And yet he has the audacity to say "I learned that one will see this sort of problems in all large scale companies."? Really? This is absurd. I can't wrap my head around the sort of arrogance and myopia that makes a 21 or 22 yr old think that he can describe an entire w…

>This is a person at his first job out of college and he's been there for less than a year. And yet he has the audacity to say "I learned that one will see this sort of problems in all large scale companies."? Really? This is absurd.

Can you just learn from his experience that he describes, and get over an inconsequential phrase at a tiny part of the post?

Even if it's not applicable "everywhere", it's a nice description of what he found in his parts of Microsoft.

Not to mention that as a senior engineer that's seen several companies (and had done contract work for others), it's pretty much spot on in general.

>Even with my experience, I don't think I've seen much more than a thin slice of the variance in practices that is out there.

Which is besides the point. What he describes it pretty normal stuff, going on all around:

1) companies not having much internal documentation for lots of their stuff,

2) not everyone being overly enthusiastic for coding,

3) code fixes that doesn't have business value are not very welcome,

4) people can mostly squeeze 3-4 hours of good coding a day, etc.

That's not some obscure practices, or some arcane rituals that only happen on a small slice of companies. Those are pretty much the norm all around.

Some companies might do better or worse in some aspects, but it's not like there are some alien practices or some novel ways to deal with software that are out there in companies and you have to explore very hard to find them... Even if they were, they would be so little spread that it won't matter.

>I can't wrap my head around the sort of arrogance and myopia that makes a 21 or 22 yr old think that he can describe an entire world from such limited experience.

Are you fucking kidding me? That's what 21 year olds do. Make strong statements and have strong opinions on their limited experience.

It's the myopia of not knowing this very basic fact, that I cannot wrap my head around.

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

#128

Post by dclusin »

infinitone wrote: post #105
JonFish85 wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft is the complete opposite of Facebook's "Move fast and break things". And that's a good thing, in a lot of ways. When entire companies (industries?) are dependent on you: slow & steady to get it right is much, much better than moving quickly to integrate the newest technology.

How is Microsoft slow and steady when he just told you they have poor code quality, no docs, etc.

Internal documentation of functionality/features/whatever and documentation of externalized API's & protocols meant to be consumed by any johnny come lately are two separate beasts. If the QA/validation process that is applied to external documentation was also imposed as a requirement on internal documentation then nothing would get done.

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

#130

Post by shaydoc »

I am sure there's gazillions of opportunities to do cool stuff with Microsoft, its just a matter of peaking above the water, surveying what's happening and making some connections and eventually moving into something more exciting. In a huge company of course you will encounter all aspects of life, and there is nothing wrong with that, why should everything be full pelt all of the time. Also Microsoft are a business, they have so many products to support, they have customers to keep happy, so innovation is not going to be the core in many of these areas.

Seems to me if you want what you are after you should try and get into Microsoft's research department..

What I will say is that overall, from an outsider, to me I find azure extremely innovative as a solution. The power at my hands with Azure is quite phenomenal. I mean, by myself I have been able to build a scalable application that would have been considered a huge project in some companies I had worked for earlier in my career.

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