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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

#181

Post by alpb »

vbv wrote: post #159
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,…

I have a gut feeling that he works as an SDE in Test (SDET). I have been through the same experience in my first 2 years. SDETs go through a very different experience as compared to a PM or SDE at Microsoft.

Hey there, author of the post here. Yes I am an SDET but what does this change? Are SDETs supposed to go through all this experience? Why nobody is fixing this? So if people are escaping from being a Test engineer, what can we infer about current test engineers?

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

#182

Post by alpb »

matwood wrote: post #109

Expect no documentation in corporations. True anywhere. Lots of OSS is horribly documented. Documentation is not only hard, but adds debt that now must be maintained. No documentation is better than wrong documentation. It is not what you do, it is what you sell. Welcome to business (and life really). While selling styling changes is going to be hard, selling bug fixing, code changes to be more robust and easier to m…

Hey there, author of the post here. Thanks for your comments. I agree all your arguments. This post was intended to be expected vs reality and you are also pointing out the reality. So I am just sharing what my reality is publicly. :) thanks for the comment.

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

#183

Post by benched »

bencxr wrote: post #174
benched wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was at Microsoft for 5 years, in a completely different group from the OP. My experience matched his exactly, in character and specifics.

one of the things i liked about Microsoft is that you can move teams (pretty) easily. i myself have had different experiences/practices in both the teams i was a part of.

I didn't think having to maneuver around passive aggression and outright blocking by current management, or having to pass full interview loops for each new position, were particularly fluid. Perhaps in a culture of hyper-competitiveness, some find those circumstances exciting. I found them good reasons to leave the company.

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

#184

Post by alpb »

jedanbik wrote: post #26

I wish I could say things were better on the academic end of scientific computing. Expect no documentation in corporations. --> Expect no documentation in research code. It is not what you do, it is what you sell. --> It is not what you do, it is what you publish. Not everybody is passionate for engineering. --> It is not what you do, it is what you publish. 2-3 hours of coding a day is great. --> It is not what you…

Hey there, author of the post here. Thanks for pointing that out, this is supporting and it feels good. I was also thinking about the academia path before my graduation.

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

#185

Post by alpb »

Danieru wrote: post #13

I am doing an internship in Windows and I have to say his first few points are right on the dot. 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…

Hey there, author of the post here. By "documentation" I mean docs for millions of lines of code written for the infrastructure running our systems internally and not shipped to public. These are dark areas that one can't easily find documentation in corporations, IMO.

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

#186

Post by inafield »

DrJokepu wrote: post #132
kryten wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. Joy to the European work ethic. I haven't worked past 5 for the last 10 years. I refuse to do unpaid work and overtime. Would your employer bill you out for free? Nope.

Actually yes, it's called a bonus.

What's a bonus? I'm a top employee for my employer but I've never had this phantom thing.

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

#187

Post by guyzero »

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…

COWORKERS OVER 35??

I'm shocked they hadn't been "renewed" by "Carrousel". Or were they runners?

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

#188

Post by [deleted] »

shanselman wrote: post #25
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…

Ya, he's not paying attention. I work for Azure and everyone is very clearly aware of the world and the competition.

[deleted]

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

#189

Post by alpb »

shanselman wrote: post #25
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…

Ya, he's not paying attention. I work for Azure and everyone is very clearly aware of the world and the competition.

(Hi there, I'm the author.) Scott, you are a PM manager, you have to hear about it. What I am pointing out is individual contributors (SDEs and SDETs) mostly have never heard of these. Even the senior ones, I am pretty sure.

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

#190

Post by nostrademons »

sidww2 wrote: post #154
gohrt wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The job of the engineer is to ship products, not code. (Unless you sell code or maybe library-components) See, it's easy to ship responsibility on either side, with the exact same line of reasoning.

Usually though that product code will be worked on by many other people. The same is often not true of academic projects.

There's still an opportunity cost to writing documentation. How many other people will work on that code? 2-3? 12? 100? 2000? If it's 2-3 or even a dozen, you're better off explaining in person how it works, while if it's 2000 there better be some persistent written documentation.

It probably also doesn't help that the number of people who look at a given piece of code follows a power law, which means that when you're doing the looking, you are probably looking at a piece of code that many other people have looked at. Everybody remembers the terrible mess that they had to puzzle out without any documentation. Most of the time they don't remember all the little experiments they did that never saw the light of day, where time spent documenting would just be wasted.

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