Frustration, Disappointment And Apathy: My Years At Microsoft

I know that there are lots of smart people at Microsoft and that they are perfectly capable of making effective products, but I think this effectively sums up all of my feelings towards today's Microsoft:

> This company is becoming the McDonalds of computing. Cheap, mass products, available everywhere. No nutrients, no ideas, no culture. Windows 8 is a fine example. The new Metro interface displays nonstop, trivial updates from Facebook, Twitter, news sites and stock tickers. Streams of raw noise distract users from the moment they login.

well, does not seem too different from other big companies i met over the years. but blaming "the system" is just the easy way out. it is your job to be productive in an environment, if you can't, leave, better sooner than later - you are just becoming part of overhead you are complaining about.

So these kinds of peeks inside a large company are fascinating in a voyeuristic sense, but it's best to not to take them too seriously. Even somebody with no ulterior motives will only have a experience of a narrow slice of the company. And it's even worse when there is an obvious reason for bias.

Certainly much of what I've seen written about Google had little to with the reality I observed there, regardless of whether the source is a current Googler or one of the, err..., rather vocally dissatisfied ex-Googlers. So I don't see much reason to believe this story about Microsoft either.

My story is similar. I was looking to get a tech job out of college a couple of years back, and Microsoft picked me up first (Google was also interested with talks of similar offers but they moved much slower).

It was all interesting and new for the first few months. The team was going through chaotic transitions at the time, so I was shuffled around many challenging projects, all with tight deadlines and technical brokenness up the yin-yang. Luckily for them, this kind of environment was my forte.

Being the workaholic hacker I've always been, I spent day and night slaving away trying to fix everything. Processes, tools, bugs. I broke the daily build a couple of times but surprisingly, nobody gave me heck about it; I was earning a reputation as the new guy who got shit done. In retrospect, I was probably deliberately thrown into the projects that seemed hopeless and bug-ridden because I actually cared about this stuff.

And I realized I was the only one who cared.

The day I received my "Gold Star" (which was actually far more than the $1K the author got), I remember walking by a sign someone had posted that said "Change the world or go home". And then it hit me -- nobody here believed this except me. Everything was a business case analysis. Shit remained broken and bug-ridden because some key stakeholder needed it to work that way on their even more broken systems. Meetings about when to schedule the next meetings. Blame being thrown around abstract "teams", so no actual person had to be accountable when the shit hit the fan. It was all so pointless. Sure, it made money, and I was taking a happy slice. But I didn't care about money. I cared about changing the world.

I deliberated for a day or two, then sent in my resignation.

What followed was several weeks of escalation and meetings with higher-up execs trying to convince me to stay with the company, explaining their idea of where the division was headed. The problem was that everyone literally had a different idea of what that was. It just did more to convince me that this was sinking ship, and they saw me as a plug.

Needless to say, I broke free, and I don't touch Microsoft products anymore. I saw the brokenness from the inside, and I have no faith in the byproducts of their "processes" and managerial wankery.

I'm doing the startup thing now, which in retrospect I should have been doing in the first place. And I couldn't be happier.