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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

#191

Post by alpb »

VLM wrote: post #145

"Everybody loves finding Stack Overflow answers on search results, but nobody contributes those answers." Nobody OFFICIALLY does that. Probably because subsection 89 paragraph 12 clause 9 specifically prohibits that kind of activity on company time, and the company owns everything you produce or think of outside work blah blah blah, only company officers may speak for the company and you're not an officer, and you ar…

Hi, I'm the author. I don't think there is a company policy that restricts that or any manager that would be mad because you're answering comments on Stack Overflow. It is all about culture in my reality and I personally post answers whenever I solve stuff.

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

#192

Post by bkurtz13 »

alpb wrote: post #166
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…

Hey there, author of the post here. I thought I may justify what I said. I have friends in almost all big companies and I discuss them about these issues a lot. Almost all of them agree that they are in a similar situation. I know that even Microsoft is a huge world and NOT all organizations are the same. All organizations have their own culture so there's no common culture in the company I can describe. In a way thi…

I am at the same point in my career as you. My first job out of college was at HP. I must say that everything you mentioned was the case for me too.

Now I'm at a smaller company, and my quality of life has improved tremendously.

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

#193

Post by [deleted] »

alpb wrote: post #166
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…

Hey there, author of the post here. I thought I may justify what I said. I have friends in almost all big companies and I discuss them about these issues a lot. Almost all of them agree that they are in a similar situation. I know that even Microsoft is a huge world and NOT all organizations are the same. All organizations have their own culture so there's no common culture in the company I can describe. In a way thi…

[deleted]

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

#194

Post by driverdan »

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…

Getting fired from a job that sounds as miserable as his description depicts seems like a good thing to me. It's not like he'll have trouble finding a new one.

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

#195

Post by reledi »

> In college, I learned code quality is as important as the result, turned out wrong.

I'm surprised you learned this in college. My department couldn't care less about code quality, and in fact they teach a lot of stuff that goes against the majority of style guides. In an extreme case, I've seen code written by a senior student that repeated tons of code because he didn't use loops, and he passed the assignment just fine.

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

#197

Post by vbv »

alpb wrote: post #181
vbv wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I tend to agree with your post as I have been through what you are going through. I still regret taking the SDET role. In general SDETs do a lot of janitor kind of work. Cleaning up after the Devs and PMs. At the end of the day what everyone cares is that you have tested everything and not how you do it. I used to do a lot of system admin kind of work i.e. setting up machines, installing OS, running scripts, running existing test suites, etc. instead of writing new tests or new test frameworks. I am afraid this will take a long time to change. The only thing we can do now is move away from the SDET role. I can't guarantee if it'll be any better but it won't be as worse as being an SDET.

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

#198

Post by [deleted] »

mncolinlee wrote: post #140

This article has me worried for the author. His cut-and-paste comments alone would drive most corporate legal and PR teams crazy. Normally, this sort of honest personal blog about corporate culture would be okay inside a corporate intranet portal, but forbidden when sent to the wider tech universe. I hope for his sake that he has understanding managers up the chain and a good second job planned out.

[deleted]

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

#199

Post by stuartd »

"Everybody loves finding Stack Overflow answers on search results, but nobody contributes those answers. I can understand that."

Hmm. I see lots of excellent answers on Stack Overflow from declared Microsoft engineers, and undoubtedly many more undeclared ones. I think the OP is extrapolating, but also that s/he may have caught something of the culture there..

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

#200

Post by mtdewcmu »

mncolinlee wrote: post #140

This article has me worried for the author. His cut-and-paste comments alone would drive most corporate legal and PR teams crazy. Normally, this sort of honest personal blog about corporate culture would be okay inside a corporate intranet portal, but forbidden when sent to the wider tech universe. I hope for his sake that he has understanding managers up the chain and a good second job planned out.

Maybe, but what's wrong with pasting code from one Microsoft project to another? I think the company would be overreacting. This post could have been subtitled, "holy cow, this is not college anymore." Most of it sounds like universal coming-of-age stuff that could have been written about pretty much anywhere.
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