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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

#251

Post by dap »

bproctor wrote: post #228
dap wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I pretty sure he meant most of his friends work at big companies.

Yeah, that's a more plausible reading. Thanks.

But that undermines the original point about big companies even more. Having friends at mostly big companies is not only not enough to generalize about big companies, but it provides no information about whether other companies struggle with these issues too.

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

#252

Post by thornkin »

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and Office), and his statements are nearly 100% accurate: - Literally any piece of documentation was always 1+ years out of date.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…

How, after 2 summers as an intern, do you know how many times people were promoted? Microsoft doesn't let people sit around for 12-18 years.

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

#253

Post by kryten »

DrJokepu wrote: post #179
kryten wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I get a hefty one of them as well. What's your point? I don't expect one. My basic salary is what I expect.

Employers hand out bonuses to incentivise enployees to stay. Employees do unpaid overtime to incentivise employers to keep them. My point is that they are fundamentally similar concepts. It's great that you're in a position where your employer wants to incentivise you to stay around by giving you bonuses yet you don't need to do overtime to keep your job. I'm also in a similar position. Some people aren't, and this h…

Not being disposable or fungible is their incentive for keeping me.

The things that make me stay at a company isn't the carrot dangled in front of me like some circus animal who needs to do their performance.

People are too grateful for jobs. Employers use this to enforce servitude on people under terrible terms and people just lap it up every time.

I'd rather sleep on the street than sell my soul.

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

#254

Post by kfk »

potatolicious wrote: post #150
sinkasapa wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

There is more to life than your profession. Or, more generally, there is more to life than one single thing . Some people let a single thing (or a very, very small number of things) define themselves, and it's a bad idea. Think critically - how are you defined? If you asked the 5 people closest to you, how would they describe you? If they can't get much further than "good software guy", be careful. Life is way too sh…

Life is way too short to be one-dimensional

Hi, if you don't mind, I am going to use this citation a lot.

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

#255

Post by AlisdairO »

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…

> Programming is mostly reading code. I don't feel like looking it up right now, but Clean Code references the study. Reading code is coding.

Well said - certainly the most valuable skill I've picked up post education and working for $BIGCORP is the ability to quickly read and understand other people's code.

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

#256

Post by porker »

jarek wrote: post #249
Paul_D_Santana wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow, incredibly profound. THANK YOU. Upvoted. It is an extremely difficult thing to accept that one should not think of one's identity and aim in life by their employment, isn't it?

> It is an extremely difficult thing to accept that one should not think of one's identity and aim in life by their employment, isn't it? It really isn't. Why would you even begin to think in that in the first place?

Plenty of reasons. Firstly, look at how society interacts. "What do you do?" is a frequent conversation starter with new people, and already pigeon holes us by our employment. That starts to build a sense of identity with our work.

Then there's the vicious reward cycle. Do something right with work and you're rewarded with praise, with positive feedback, with kudos. Do something wrong and... well you see where it's going. It's more subtle than how I train my dog, but not much.

And then the tech world is in awe to entrepreneurs and startups, where long hours and being defined by passion for what you do and it being the sole calling in life are the norm. You or I, older now I suspect (I certainly am) may look at it and shake our heads and think of the failed relationships we've seen (the same in any high-powered area of work), but for people without that view it's not easy. I had the same way of thinking as the OP, and even now I still get jealous of those who achieve much by having their work as their identity and aim in life.

And finally society again. There seems to be a growing expectation this is the norm and the right way, like the acceptance that single parent families are normal and a good way for children to be brought up (don't argue with the subject, think about how long that's been an accepted view). For ambitious, maybe insecure graduates starting out in work, that's a huge sense of competing to 'get to the top'. Why they're not sure, but it sure gives one an identity... or does it?

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

#257

Post by lostlogin »

pm wrote: post #241
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.

Sure, it's "move slow and break things". As judged by my experiences with most Microsoft products over the last twenty years, and reinforced by my current experience with Windows Azure's bizarre engineering choices and instability issues (the team to which the OP was assigned).

I drive an MRI scanner or 2 that are built on windows 2000. It's so very painful that modern scanners use such old OSs. The OS is masked from the user, but as soon as you try to do something complex (real complex, like getting images onto a memory stick) you have to use a series of crude hacks to get an explorer window up, then work around the disabled functions to get data off the scanner without using the network port.

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

#258

Post by dschiptsov »

The only intention of a bureaucrat is to keep and strengthen his's position, that's why they do meetings and paper pushing and finger-pointing most of the time - just to cover his ass and survive to the end-of-year bonus.

It is so obvious (and ridiculous) that nginx has more market share than IIS precisely because of lack of meetings and design documents.))

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

#259

Post by aaronbrethorst »

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…

Good luck. I don't really envy you for the next 1:1 you'll have with your manager.

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

#260

Post by gtirloni »

aaronbrethorst wrote: post #259
alpb wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Good luck. I don't really envy you for the next 1:1 you'll have with your manager.

Good point. Utterly unprofessional of him to post something so specific for a company instead of discussing it privately. Even then, he should probably work on providing some suggestions instead of engaging in the blame game alone.

I was reading this post as if he was not working for M$ anymore. Also, he might be safeguarding a future for him in small startup with the same attitude... if he is fine limiting his options so much, good luck.

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