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Proudly Serving My Corporate Masters
Barr worked as a low-level developer at Microsoft and his account in Proudly Serving My Corporate Masters, built around his firsthand experience, offers a perspective on the company "from the ranks". This is combined with more general commentary on recent computing issues, with reflections on evangelism, community, and open source. The result has something for a range of people: those curious about Microsoft, involved in debates about the merits of open source, responsible for recruitment and management of programmers, or just interested in computing history.
Barr begins by describing how he came to work for Microsoft. This is the start of four chapters on Microsoft's recruitment system, covering both the initial selection on campus, the interview system, and the overall effectiveness. There is also an introduction to how work is structured at Microsoft, in particular the division between developers, program managers, and testers. Three chapters then describe Barr's time at SoftImage, a Microsoft acquisition producing digital editing software. Here we are introduced to the different types of "demos" (from carefully scripted sessions presented by special "demo artists" to genuine "hands-on" demos) and the complexities of dealing with third-party hardware suppliers.
Three chapters then present a potted history of computing over the last twenty years or so, beginning with an account Barr wrote as a teenager back in 1982, after visiting ComDex. Barr focuses on evangelism - on the factors that contribute to one platform or operating system winning out over others - and in particular why IBM PC hardware became ubiquitous, why MSDOS beat CP/M-86, and why Windows beat OS/2. None of this is particularly novel, but it's a nice lively account.
This leads naturally to more recent conflicts and debates which pit (as flagship icons) Microsoft against Linux. Again, there is nothing spectacular here, but Barr offers an intelligent, informed, and balanced perspective, coming up with some points that were new to me. Of the claim that it will be difficult to find programmers to do the "unsexy" work with Linux, for example, he writes
"Microsoft, being a company with salaries and a supervisory hierarchy, has the ability to order someone to work on something he or she doesn't want to work on, but I never recall this happening. People worked on things that interested them and projects still got complete coverage. There is no reason that the same should not be true of Linux, especially given the size of the Linux community."Two chapters evaluate attacks against Microsoft, the first addressing popular criticisms and the second the various legal attacks. Here Barr is level-headed, calmly rebutting some of the sillier attacks while accepting valid criticisms.
A major weakness of this material is that Barr only ever talks about "open source" (a development methodology) and never about "free software" (a much broader movement). One major reason for techs ranting at Microsoft is their unhappiness with loss of choice, freedom, and control - and this has been articulated as an ethical and political position by the Free Software Foundation and others. But Barr never considers this argument against Microsoft at all.
A chapter on online community is really a digression. The final two chapters then consider the future of Microsoft. Barr argues that Microsoft should stick to its core PC business and not get distracted by ventures such as the XBox. He ends where he started, arguing that the key to Microsoft's future lies in its handling of employees, in its ability to attract, recruit, and retain good people.
Proudly Serving is nicely laid out and has obviously been carefully edited. Barr avoids most technical details (an exception is some discussion of buses and video hardware in the chapters on SoftImage) and offers separate digressions on Code, APIs, and Middleware. A minor complaint is that the workings of Microsoft stock options are only explained in the last chapter, by which point the reader will either have worked it out for themselves or decided they don't care.
Purchase this book from FatBrain. Visit the author's web site or check out Danny Yee's five hundred other book reviews.
There were no buttons. The walls were inlaid with strange runes and glyphs. Once we'd entered the doors closed quickly behind, and we began our decent. The air seemed to quiver, and I felt a great uneasiness. My Controller's face was unmoved. He still wore his dark glasses despite the relatively dim lighting.
We came to slow halt, and the doors opened. What images then came into view are so horrific that the very thought of them puts me into a terrible panic.
A vast hall stretched forth lined with arches the likes my eyes had never seen. Arrayed in a great grid were hundreds of people strapped into black chairs which seemed to envelope their bodies. My God. It was them. All of those ex-Mac developers. So, here is where they'd all gone. Their bodies shaved and naked were bristling with wires and tubes anchoring them into some kind of demonic machine beneath the floor. I could feel the dark energies churning beneath my feet and imagined huge gears grinding in an alien orchestra devised for some purpose beyond comprehension.
Two Controllers approached from the far side of the hall. In their hands were strange surgical tools. But, these warped, metallic devices were for no humane medical operations, but for some preverted task of which I wanted no part. I tried to run, but my Controller grapped my arm with a cold grip of uncanny strength. Then I remembered what the crazy old man had told me in the town...
Someone you trust is one of us.
Funny enough I was just reading about the author and some of his columns: here's some links
columns
home page
comments posted at kur5shin.org
stories posted to kuro5hin.org. one i like is where he talked about NT's TCP/IP stack history and why it's not from BSD
He's no MS shrill he was the one a while back proposed that we use the XBox as a cheap web farm
anyway interesting stuff.
-Jon
this is my sig.
Maybe we should call it liberated software, so people will understand what we mean. Free is more often used to mean without cost, rather than with liberty, and people assume the most common meaning.
Software that is given away, but not open source, we should refer to as zero-cost software.
Saying liberated software versus zero-cost software makes everything completely unambigous.
Just because it CAN be done, doesn't mean it should!
for those that don't want to shell out for the book, you can read it here. That's certainly what I've been doing.
"'Proudly Serving My Corporate Masters'... it's a cookbook! Nooooo!"
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"I would say that 99 per cent of what my father has written about his own life is false." - L. Ron Hubbard Jr.
Well, the best modellers in the world don't necesarily design for Revell, and the best mechanics aren't necessarily down at your local BF Goodrich. Programming is a skill, to be sure, but you don't have to put your skills to work for you, or necesarily charge people when you use them. I'm sure we all have skills or know people who do that are of a professional level, perhaps even a superb level, but don't have that particular job. How many of us slashdotters are accountants with hardware and networking skills, doctors with oratorial dictation skills, and so forth?
I may program now, and program well, for money. But I don't always want to be a snooty wage slave working for the corporate world, turning coding tricks for people richer than me. Someday, I want to teach (academia being a relatively level field)...but when I do turn in my ASP in a Nutshell book and swipe card, I'm sure as sin not turning in my programming skills. I'll probably just move them into another arena: freelance, shareware, open source free software. "Top tier engineers" aren't necesarily what free software needs -- an engineer once told me that you only have 8 years of programming time in the industry until you're technically just a product manager, telling younger programmers what to PEEK and where to POKE. Linux succeeds because the people who do the boring work(printer drivers, TCP/IP interfaces, and so on) are the ones who need it done...the incentive to do the work isn't "i need to get paid," but rather "i need to print something. It's survival-response programming, patch-the-inner-tube programming, and it's why Linux is often very terse in its interfaces...but still very efficient.
Hey freaks: now you're ju
I worked for MS as in intern a few summers ago, and I hung out with some the real high-level programmers (the ones who get to make REAL decisions) during my smoke breaks. They had an interesting perspective on free software.
Their most convincing argument is that programming is a job. It's work, and it can be hard work at times. But if all software is free, then who pays the programmers? It's pretty clear by this time that selling support contracts don't work. If a company can't pay its programmers, then who would work for them.
They were continually amazed at the amount of work that is poured into free software, and they wondered what Linux or *BSD would be like if there were some system for everyone who contributes to be compensated. I can recall one of the engineers saying something like, "We [MS] wouldn't have a chance if people with REAL talent [professional programmers] were contributing to the free software movement. Thank god the only people who really contribute are kiddies."
Now, I don't think everyone who contributes to free software is a kiddie, but it does bring up an interesting point: what would Linux be like today if it could attract top-tier engineers?