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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

#91
"Expect no documentation in corporations" -- Don't expect code to be documented anywhere, ever. It's great when it exists. Even then, don't expect it to be accurate.

"It is not what you do, it is what you sell" -- Capitalism -- welcome to America.

"Not everybody is passionate for engineering" -- You could probably find a place to work where everyone is passionate about engineering, but I sense that these places are uncommon and highly competitive.

"it is almost impossible to get 2 hours straight of coding for me. I spend most of my time trying to figure out how others’ uncommented/undoumented code work, debugging strange things..." -- That doesn't count?

"The world outside is not known here a lot." -- This is probably symptomatic of the time when Microsoft was the center of the universe. It's not true everywhere.

"Copy-pasting code can be okay. If somebody sees you doing this outside the corporations, you’ll probably get punched in the face. I’ve seen source files copy pasted across projects." -- In college, you have to show that you can do the assignment yourself. In the open source world, you have to be mindful of copyright and licensing. Inside a company, it's all the company's code, so there's nothing wrong with it. You don't have to prove that you can write it yourself.

"Almost 90% of my colleagues use older versions of Office, Windows, Visual Studio and .NET Framework." -- It's pretty common knowledge that that's true outside of Microsoft, but it's interesting to know that it's true inside.

"You are hired to do get something needed done. I was not expecting that. It’s hard to find a position in corporations matches what you love to do." -- Again, capitalism. You make things for other people, not yourself.

There's always a tension between competing priorities; the thrill of engineering something wonderful, the reality of being part of an organization made up of people, and the need to keep money coming in the door. A lot of things are just facts of life, but an environment can also become toxic. At that point you have to leave.

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

#92
coming from the same company, here are my few thoughts when I was joined on Day1..i hated that there is no documentation, but learnt about system by talking to people mostly. and infact no one has given me time to learn. right now for the stuff I have been doing, i dont have time to document them. in Agile, my managers are not expecting me to spend time on that. once some user story satisfy biz. req. they dont want to waste spending time on making absoutely beautiful code or at least they move to technical debt and never look at that again.

code reviews can be skipped sometimes, usually I too go by offline review and checkin. even the people I work with don't give a fk about open source, HN/reddit or about competitors. at our level we are there to develop what we are told to. If you are interested in something you have to spend time after 6PM at home which is reality in most agile teams. to end 'LIVE WITH IT'

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

#93
post #66

>At the end, you are working for your manager’s and their managers’ paychecks. You are working to get the shareholders a better share price and dividend payout.

I'm working to climb Maslow's hierarchy and achieve self-actualization.

If managers and stockholders benefit from that, that's cool with me.

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

#94
post #65
post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not if you love what you're doing.

I totally love what im doing, but forgive me, i love my family more.

I love my family, my health, and life more. Work, while important to me, isn't even near the top of my priority list. I work so that I can do the things and be around the people I truly care about.

My only real life regret is that I didn't realize it a bit sooner.

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

#95
post #50
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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 totally agree. I only work past 6 if I came in late. Otherwise there are plenty of hobbies to catch up with. Mine is making a nice dinner for myself at the end of the day. In that way you also get more time to work on your personal/side projects or even contribute to open source.

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

#98

"I am surprised that no one I met in Windows Azure team heard about Heroku or Rackspace, which are direct competitors. That’s acceptable, not everybody has to know these." WOW! It's one thing to ignore competitors, it's another to not know who they are. I thought (by reputation) that Microsoft was a competitive place. "It’s hard to find a position in corporations matches what you love to do." Seems obvious, but hinds…

Ya, he's not paying attention. I work for Azure and everyone is very clearly aware of the world and the competition.

scott, hope he is not creating controversy by publicizing his team n stuff..
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