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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

#201

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?

Also if you get a chance read this blog post written by a Microsoft Dev Manager.

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/eric_brechner/archive/2011/05/01/tes...

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

#202

Post by LeonidasXIV »

reledi wrote: post #195

> 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…

In my university, I'm pretty sure you can graduate with even decent to good grades without having written any single program that worked. So maybe this grind is exactly the right thing for these people.

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

#203

Post by runfaster2000 »

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…

Some teams at Microsoft do have internal documentation. We decided about 10 years ago, before our product got away from us, to start documenting the architecture. This is something that our management completely supported (they may have even suggested it), and we added this effort to our schedule, not as a "slack time" thing. Turns out that forcing yourself to document the architecture also helps keep the architecture sane because it really hurts to document something ugly.

We also have a ton of specs, archived off over the last 15 years. Those can sometimes be quite useful.

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

#205

Post by dap »

coldtea wrote: post #127
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 descri…

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

Actually, no. The post wasn't phrased as "here was my experience", and rightly so: there are lots of terrible engineering organizations, and many readers wouldn't hugely care about yet another such horror story. Rather, the post reads as advice that new grads learn early to be resigned to what they might otherwise perceive to be dysfunctional engineering. I think there's too much of that already, and it's frustrating to see a post advocating that.

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

#206

Post by dap »

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 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.

Really? You have friends in almost all big companies?

There's a lot of truth in the points you mention, but even in my limited experience (six years at two companies, one very large and one pretty small), it's much more complex than you suggest. Many of these things were flat out not the case at both companies (e.g., the points about "the world outside"), some of them were absolutely true of both (2-3 hours of coding per day is common), and some were worse at the small company (e.g., documentation).

I'm with the parent: these issues have little to do with company size, but they do reflect the quality of an organization. In both environments I've worked in, to the extent that these issues were present, they were considered problems to be fixed, not something to be resigned about.

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

#207

Post by jussij »

This does read like someone just out of college, working on their first job.

> Every company has its own problems.

Over time you'll find most companies/organisations operate in very similar ways.

I'd say it's not even specific to the I.T. industry, but rather, just the way people tend to operate.

It’s the politics of human interaction and the bigger the organisation the more politics you will find.

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

#209

Post by robryan »

sinkasapa wrote: post #70
jgh wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Working past 6 should be considered absurd unless you start at 10 or 11.. There's a world out there for you to enjoy, and many people fought hard for workers rights so we don't have kill ourselves over work.

I agree if you're working in some drone farm. Without a personal stake, why do people feel enthusiastic about following orders that keep them locked up at work all day? I understand that there may be coercion, like the threat of being fired, but if you're just writing software for your company, where does the enthusiasm for long hours come in? I'm freelance, and I love working on my projects. I often work long hours.…

Without some drive and enthusiasm about what you are doing those 9-5s could end up being a lot worse than the alternative of putting in some extra effort because you are really enthusiastic about what you are doing.
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