In 8 months at Microsoft, I learned these things • Hacker News Board

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

#261

Post by theoutlander » Thu, Jun 13, 2013, 8:44 AM UTC

There's a lot of truth to this article. Some of it might be team specific. I've heard Azure in general is still evolving. I spent 6 years in Bing, a few months on internal MS tools, and a year in Exchange. In Bing, I had 20 managers over 5 years whereas in Exchange, I had just one for the entire year.

Overall, Test was a joke in Bing and most of the people there weren't passionate about coding. They were simply concerned with their bonuses and paychecks. 360 feedback was all about bringing others down. Managers cared about their promotions and fat checks. This problem might be common across large companies - I've heard that from several friends across the industry.

Since I left MS, I've been happier than ever!! Now, I'm making a difference in the world saving millions of lives and the extra time that I put in is well worth it as it's not about competing against yet another product! :)

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

#262

Post by joefarish » Thu, Jun 13, 2013, 8:57 AM UTC

kristianc wrote: post #147

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. Fwiw, I read it as a way of (plausibly) covering his ass if he was ever hauled in front of management about the post, not a way of overstating his experience. YMMV.

It's not absurd. Perhaps he shared his experiences at Microsoft with friends and relatives who work at other large companies and they told him they had the same experience?

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

#263

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Jun 13, 2013, 9:13 AM UTC

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…

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

#264

Post by davidong » Thu, Jun 13, 2013, 9:26 AM UTC

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…

> I actually was able to do some open source work with Codeplex

Nice, I guess people in your area had done this before and nobody was scared of sharing code. My experience wasn't so good.

I wrote some BizTalk VS-LoadTest extensions while contracting at Microsoft UK and battled for the best part of 3 months to get permission to share them on CodePlex.

While everyone agreed it was good for the company and the products and an all-round good idea to open source the code, nobody would put their neck on the line and give me written permission to do so. So it didn't happen.

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

#265

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Jun 13, 2013, 9:53 AM UTC

jgh wrote: post #78

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.…

Even if you're not working at some drone farm you should probably take time to yourself to relax and spend time with your friends/family. I understand if you're freelance and you have deadlines and whatnot you'll need to work long/odd hours, but honestly you shouldn't have to kill yourself with work. I enjoy what I do and have a large equity stake in it, but I'm not going to burn myself out because "I love what I'm d…

[deleted]

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

#266

Post by joesb » Thu, Jun 13, 2013, 10:01 AM UTC

> Expect no documentation in corporations. [...] If this would have been my own company there would be tons of wiki pages.

Yes, it it were your company you would have all you employees write tons of document instead of working on new project and actually making money, I know all freelancer and small company have tons of document and run on CMM5.

Wonder why all old CEO never thought of this. They should hire this guy to be the new CEO.

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

#267

Post by mahmud » Thu, Jun 13, 2013, 10:35 AM UTC

SideburnsOfDoom wrote: post #99

> Code reviews can be skipped, for the sake of agility that word, "agility". I do not think that it means what you think it means.

He forgot the "fr" before that "agility".

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

#268

Post by joesb » Thu, Jun 13, 2013, 10:39 AM UTC

yuhong wrote: post #75

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…

Also: http://www.proudlyserving.com/archives/2005/09/an_open_lette...

I do think there's a different between opinion of a manager who's been working for ten years and a new-grad who's just had his first job for eight months.

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

#269

Post by Aardwolf » Thu, Jun 13, 2013, 11:07 AM UTC

> If this would have been my own company there would be tons of wiki pages.

Ah how naive :)

> The world outside is not known here a lot. I bet you’re reading what sort of latest technologies and tools are out on blogs, Reddit or Hacker News every day.

Not reading any tech news sites at all? That is odd, so many developers do.

> Not everybody is fond of latest versions here.

Must be a Windows culture thing. I don't know many Linux users who aren't using the latest version with all programs often or even automatically updated. Except some university computer labs using ancient Linux distros like Mandrake.

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

#270

Post by pm » Thu, Jun 13, 2013, 12:48 PM UTC

lostlogin wrote: post #257

pm wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 p…

Heh, that reminds me of all the bad scanner software I've ever dealt with in my time, and wondering how dead inside that person truly must be to have had to write it in the first place.