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In 8 months at Microsoft, I learned these things
161–170 of 286 posts
Re: In 8 months at Microsoft, I learned these things
#162I understand his experience. I've been mainly, (70% of the time), a third party Windows developer and admin for the last two decades and have spent thousands of hours working with and talking to Microsoft folks. Even have a few family members that work for the corporation. NIH: Many Remondites live in the "bubble" where technology from the outside doesn't exist or doesn't matter. (It reminds me of the hard core Repub…
(It reminds me of the hard core Republican base.)
hn works better without this kind of snark. I'm sure the "hard core Democratic base" believes most of what they read on the Daily Kos, too. Almost everyone has a bubble around something in their lives.
Re: In 8 months at Microsoft, I learned these things
#163He sounds like someone who is significantly lowering his standards. Seems like working at a big corporation is killing his spirit and energy. That is just sad. Edit: Unless he is being sarcastic?
I'm another one-year-out-of-college developer working at Amazon. This article describes how I feel almost exactly.
You might consider moving teams if you can. Not all teams at Amazon are like this.
Re: In 8 months at Microsoft, I learned these things
#164I 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.
Any chance you could shoot me an email through the contact form on my website? I have some questions.
Re: In 8 months at Microsoft, I learned these things
#165Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Do you have any recommendation for documentation then ? In my experience wikis are far from perfect and need regular gardening BUT they are vastly better than a shared folder or a sharepoint with a ton of word documents...
Depends on the project's scope, who is working on it and also users/usage I'd say. Sometimes embedded documentation can be useful (Doxygen comes to mind). Given a ton of time, it probably should be done in stages, and created starting with the requirements document(s) to at least set the stage for the thought process. There's no blanket right/wrong for all projects. For Microsoft, my guess is that it would make sense to do the inner documentation in much the same way as external documentation is done--people are used to it, the system is already in place somewhere, etc.
Re: In 8 months at Microsoft, I learned these things
#166I'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 this is good.
So the statement "Even if all teams at MS suck" would be really wrong. In addition to this, organizations get better and develop culture over time. Thanks for the comment.
Re: In 8 months at Microsoft, I learned these things
#167Earlier quoted context omitted.
Where did he mention poor code quality? Out of date documentation is all I see mentioned.
I'd say that's implicit, if code that doesn't deliver business value (refactoring, documenting, etc.) is wasted, people won't do it.
I don't think code quality and documentation quality are strongly correlated, they are just complementary.
Re: In 8 months at Microsoft, I learned these things
#168Publishing 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…
Hey there, author of the post here. Thanks for supporting me, that feels good and I agree your points 100%.
I organized a "hackathon event" in The Garage for 2011 summer interns, maybe you have heard of it. I still push these sort of events and seminars that we all can more learn the outside world beyond the individual efforts.
Thanks for comment!
Re: In 8 months at Microsoft, I learned these things
#169I'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…
I read it as "An Ironic, Passive-Aggressive Retrospective on Microsoft's Wonderful Practices".
Re: In 8 months at Microsoft, I learned these things
#170I 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…
What about NuGet? It seems to work well enough.