Slashdot Mirror
James Fallows on His Brief Microsoft Tenure
GrokSoup writes, "Writer James Fallows spent the first six months of 1999 on an unnnamed project at Microsoft (a word processor for writers). While he says he can't write about the secret project, he has written this lengthy piece for The Atlantic about life at Microsoft.
It's spooky. Among other things, Fallows compares Microsoft with its "Up with programming" posters and logo attire to the military; says people pull fewer all-nighters there than he thought they would; and discovers the culture is meeting-centric (no surprise)."
Having spent the past two summer vacations as an intern at Microsoft, I can say with some authority that this article is quite accurate. I have to say that the amount of mindless propoganda ("WRITE GREAT CODE!") was exaggerated. Much more frequently you'll find articles from industry magazines on the product being developed in that part of that building (both positive and negative reviews can be found, with the latter's attack at specific features hilighted to emphasize for the team what needs to be worked on in the next release), dilbert comics, wall sized object models, and display cases showing off the earlier versions of the product. People at MS are proud of the products they develop, but they don't wear the branded clothes MS throws at them in armfulls (exaggeration) because of this. It's more of a "hey, free shirt!" attitude than a "I'm going to wear this shirt for my team" attitude. The pride just lets them wear it.
I don't think the downside of the meeting-centric culture was emphasized enough in the article. Of course, there is variance from team to team, but the number of meetings a typical employee can attend in a week can really start to bother him/her. This is especially the case because the type of person that you'll find at MS scores high on the geek scale, and (it's been my experience that) geeks tend to prefer to be working on their machine rather than discussing things in a meeting. It is perhaps because of this very fact that the meetings are so important to the smooth flow of operations within the teams. With the heavy degree of interdependance in a collaborative software design enviroment and the tendancy for the geek to work hard at his or her own feature with little regard for the rest of the universe, the meetings are a neccessary evil to pull team members back and get them looking at the Big Picture again.
Finally, with regard to ". . . Microsoft employees are thought to be haughty, sharp-tongued, and prickly to deal with.": I don't doubt that this is the case. Microsoft has one of the worst public image problems in history. But the people there _are_ acutally nice, as the author claims. They're hackers just like you'd find at any other company, except that as the author points out they tend to work more sane hours and enjoy a great deal of pampering. When the company was out leveraging it's monopoly power in unfair ways, it wasn't the devs, testers, or program managers fiendishly devising ways to force oems to install windows. All that was carried out at the upper levels by the marketing people without the knowledge of the product teams. The people developing the product have remarkably little knowledge or even care as to how the product will be delivered/marketted to the public. It didn't really suprise me to realize this. Pardon my prejudice, but I have a jaded view of the moral character of marketting/sales offices. It seems to me to be an almost unnerringly duplicitous facet of modern business.
It's plain that Microsoft has done harm. However, you look at the coders and geeks within Microsoft and they are not, for the most part, bad people. Does this invalidate the harm Microsoft has done? No, of course not- welcome to the real world. They have helped it happen, certainly did not set out each day saying "Heyyyy! Let's all stifle innovation in this industry (except from us!) and help to lock computing into some technological Dark Ages!". It's just that the work that they do is effectively harnessed to the power of a corporation which has a long history of doing just such stifling. They are not the ones in toplevel meetings telling Apple "Yes, we're asking you to 'knife the baby'. Kill Quicktime for us or you won't like the consequences". But their work enables the upper management to do just that.
Also, I would be very surprised if there wasn't a (military?) sort of elitism pervading the place. In effect, the Microsoft workers may not be frothing at the mouth to eradicate all competition in the industry- but they do, I feel, see themselves as superior to anybody else, which makes it very easy for them to be very unconcerned about their bosses acting to crush and stifle other companies. Somewhere in the back of the Microsoft worker mind is, "That's okay- if they wanted to _really_ innovate and do good things, they'd quit that company and join US!". This is not capitalism, of course- in most industries, competition is seen as a normal and healthy thing. I feel that within the Microsoft culture, competition from other companies is seen as as best a distraction from _real_ innovation, and at worst a positive roadblock- such that one could easily picture Microsoft people lobbying the government to shut down a competitor that stood in the way of Microsoft expansion. "You're hurting the economic growth of the whole country by allowing them to keep operating like that! They're blocking innovation!"
And still, none of this requires that the people involved are evil people: you just have to look at their worldview. It's all very well having elitism. Elitism plus _clout_ equals trouble.