Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft in the Mirror
Microsoft in the Mirror is written for a general audience, though some of the stories it contains are probably going to draw grins or nods only from readers interested in software and programming.
The collection of employee portraits -- first person, no last names -- starts with Carter's account of being hired (as an admin), then promoted over the course of years at the company to Editorial Assistant and eventually into management. Carter joined Microsoft when the company had a few hundred employees and called itself MicroSoft. Working in multiple divisions and levels of employeedom gave her a chance to see more of Microsoft than many employees see of the companies that employ them. (The book continues with a chapter apiece for the others; Carter's account is actually split into two, bookending the 18.)
Mirror is a breezy, personal self-portrait -- maybe too breezy and personal for some tastes; just a few pages into her text, Carter has already been through one boyfriend (her initial draw to Seattle), and a 9-year marriage (maybe I should be surprised that she mentioned it at all), and several job titles. Given the company's growth rate in its early years, perhaps this compression is necessary, but I would have enjoyed finding out more about the early days in detail, a Microsoft equivalent to the way Steven Levy describes an important stretch of computer culture in Hackers.
Though Carter's is a complete and interesting Microsoft experience (complete with sudden, transient wealth), most of the best content in this book comes from the other employees she prompted to share their stories. They speak with their own voices, in a range of prose styles and breadths; they range from chatty to Garrison Keillor-style droll, and though many of the employees' responses overlap (for instance, nearly all of them talk about their Microsoft stock options, either because those options made them rich, or because the shares and options they mishandled still haunt them), each one adds to the picture of Microsoft -- the corporation -- as a complex and demanding employer, and Microsoft -- the workplace -- as one where dress is casual, coworkers are (mostly) respectful and friendly toward each other, and office pranks are mostly good natured and elaborate.
(A few of the programmers profiled had their offices remodeled by
coworkers: Peter's floor was covered with sod, complete with
instructions to water it by activating the room's sprinkler head with a
helpfully supplied lighter, and Stewart arrived for his second day of
work to find his office occupied -- completely -- by an inflated pink
weather balloon.)
Carter (and her respondents) don't try to separate the personal from the
corporate: at a company where perqs like windowed offices for
programmers and well-stocked snack rooms for everyone are tradeoffs for
long days and nothing-is-impossible project schedules, that would be
impossible. This is refreshing at first, but after several chapters I
found some of the stories mixing in my head.
The first chapter I read was written by Yoshi, an ambitious and confident former Adobe employee, who engineered his way into a job at Microsoft when he saw Microsoft's development of TrueType looming ominously on Adobe's future -- and cutting the value of his company stock in half. So he jumped ship.
"I figured that if I took a project at Adobe that was directly relevant to MS, I would have a good chance of landing a job. So I did that, and we subscribed to the Seattle Times Sunday edition to start scoping out places to live."
Unlike some of the profiled employees, Yoshi didn't leap to Microsoft to enjoy intellectual freedom to explore abstract problems, or because the management and dress code was looser than elsewhere. Those things may be nice, but Yoshi did it for the money, including 3,000 shares of MSFT, with no apologies. His story, and tough-guy cynical attitude, also made me think of the contractor fired over a blog posting. He sums up his attitude like this:
"So I am a software mercenary. The old style of work and pensions in extinct. You get compensated if you work hard but it is merely a long contract. I am loyal as long as I am paid for my time and effort. I am a hired gun. I believe there is no dishonor to this view. In fact, I think it is more realistic and closer to how MS thinks of its people."
By contrast, Stewart's stretch at Microsoft
paints a far rosier picture of Microsoft's management as well as
the company in general. Stewart started out as a summer intern,
profiling the Xenix kernel ("hog heaven" for a college student), and
programmed in a string of other jobs throughout Microsoft, including a
mid-career stint on liason duty with IBM in Boca Raton, Florida.
Clashing corporate cultures in the shared office space meant that
"Microsoft employees racked up more security violations per day than an
IBM employee would have in a year because we didn't follow the dress
code and we didn't care about tailgating through the door." Microsoft is
thought of today as the stodgy company in some quarters; 'twasn't always
so, and the rest of Stewart's Boca Raton story makes this even
clearer.
Stewart's Microsoft story is also one of the more
challenging to Microsoft critics; he describes the Microsoft managers
under whom he worked as supportive, hands-off and efficient, and
Microsoft's coders as anything but sloppy or lazy. That "Microsoft
doesn't care about security" is a casualism that many outside Microsoft
have come to accept because of the confluence of Windows security
flaws, simple repetition of the allegation, and (as I see it)
envy. According to Stewart,
"One of the thing I liked at Microsoft was that most of the programmers there, in addition to being very bright, cared about writing quality, robust code. ... People cared about their code being as bug free as possible and were willing to sacrifice their weekends and social lives in order to write the best code they could. It was an attitude I saw throughout my twelve and a half years at Microsoft."
It's not surprising that people within the organization see Microsoft so differently; after all, the employees profiled come from different backgrounds and worked at different jobs within the company. More interesting to me is that in so many ways they agree with each other. Nearly all of them maintain that Microsoft is or was a rewarding place to work, and nearly all of them caution against something that may make recent CS graduates wince -- letting too much money go to your head. People who retired, or could have retired, in their mid-30s, really do have to ponder the problems that come with having too much money. (Mainly, that it can change your relationships to other people in unpleasant ways.)
The other employees profiled include Gerhardt (who arrived in Seattle on one week's notice from Germany, straight out of graduate school) and Ian, University of Waterloo graduate who was pushed to Microsoft in part by a Canadian recession. Work weeks of 120 hours, and sometimes only 80 (he "thought he was on vacation" when that happened) eventually led to chronic fatigue and insurance problems for Ian. In those days, he says, "Microsoft was still small enough that that once you were in, you were really in." Microsoft short circuited his insurance policy's depletion by giving him a job that he could do even while weakened, so he could remain covered by the company health plan while he recovered -- in other words, the sort of thing that a Big Faceless Corporation might not be expected to do.
Anne's is one of the shorter chapters, written with seeming restraint (and relief to be an ex-Microsoft employee) as she describes a work environment with mostly good relations between immediate coworkers and a fair amount of job satisfaction, but acrimony and bitterness between groups doing similar tasks, and "silly politics" surrounding the company's constant reorganizations that led to unnecessary stress.
Reading lightly, it's easy to get the impression that Microsoft hires only smart, competent people. Less-than-stellar managers and co-workers are mentioned in here, but mostly they're summed up with short, dismissive descriptions. I wonder whether this is more out of a good-natured desire to accentuate the positive or an illustration of our litigious society and fear of professional retribution. I would have enjoyed reading much more about what made them so awful, not out of shadenfreude, but out of simple curiosity, and to know how the vaunted Microsoft management machine dealt with them in the long term.
A three-part appendix rounds out the book. There's a short glossary of terms reflecting the book's general audience, defining abbreviations like DEC, HR and IT. A few Microsoft-specific ones are on the list too; can you guess what "calling in rich" means? A three-page timeline traces Microsoft's history from 1975 nearly up to the present day; since this book isn't about the details of Microsoft's history or its interaction with the U.S. federal court system, it's no crime that this timeline ends in 2002 and glosses over legal clashes. I'm most grateful for Carter's third appendix, which is a list of the prompts she sent to elicit the employee responses this book contains.
Since the computer industry in young (in all respects, but in particular the business of selling packaged, ready-to-run software), it's also changing rapidly. That means that even though the stories in Mirror reflect the recent past, they show how fast companies' relative fortunes shift and how quickly reputations change. A book like this -- mostly sympathetic to Microsoft, written by insiders -- doesn't pretend to be objective or to present a complete picture of the company, but it makes thought-provoking background reading if the word "Microsoft" makes you see red.
You can purchase Microsoft in the Mirror from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
Despite Microsoft's vaunted hiring interviews and techniques, it sounds like they have exactly the same problems managing people and peer-groups as every other large company.
:-)
Perhaps geeks ain't so different after all
Simon
Physicists get Hadrons!
Yes, nothing like having a real OS as primary, and having a MS box as a mirror to highlight some major embarrassing uptime stats.
There are a huge number of yeast infections in this county. Probably because we're downriver from the bread factory.
Were these the guys that brought us Windows 95?
Slashdot: Where people pretend to be twice as smart as they really are by behaving like children.
This book seems to let us see a side of the company I've often wondered about but rarely seen. Amid all the hype, lawsuits, and more, I've often wondered who the guys in the cubes are; what are they like, what do they think of their employer, how do they live.
This looks to provide a great picture of the people who make the corporate giant run. I'm not entirely anti-MS...they DO have some friendly, intelligent people working for them.
It's nice to see this side of things. Great looking book, good review.
Damon,
http://actionPlant.com
... Michael Bolton's take on the company in Appendix C.
It's stapled on.
This space for rent.
I hate the troll price bots. The price is actually 14.95 at Amazon. This means you need to spend 10.05 to qualify for free shipping. If you want to take a peek click here to buy it. I don't know when Amazon's free holiday shipping for all orders will kick in. They might keep it at a $25 minimum all quarter.
Nice work. I think I might pick up this book.
... or pay for the shipping and still pay less!
"the company had a few hundred employees and called itself MicroSoft."
MicroSoft is dead! Long live Microsoft! Umm...wait a minute...that didn't come out right.
Chaos reigns within.
Reflect, repent, and reboot.
Order shall return.
Hello, vivafusion, trying to hide your link.
I've been an "I.T. guy" ever since my first job, and frankly, I banked on "PCs and DOS/Windows solutions" as the stuff one needed to keep up with to retain a decent job.
Somewhere along the way (I think roughly around the time Microsoft started pushing Active Directory integrated with Exchange 2000, but that's far from the ONLY factor), I started becoming disillusioned with the whole thing. I had always tinkered with Linux as a curiousity and fun "alternative OS" to use at home - but couldn't spark any interest in it where I worked.
I decided to "rock the boat" a little bit, building Linux-based thin clients PCs out of old, depreciated systems being taken out of service, and asking employees to try using them on a "trial" basis. I had few complaints, and got most of the ones I did have ironed out in short order. (Mostly, people whining about needing support for their scroll wheel mice, stuff like that.)
I think it threatened my co-workers though, who were die-hard "MS only!" people. My boss was "on the fence" about the whole project, basically not wanting to stop me from experimenting - yet uneasy about it disrupting his little "happy family" of I.T. employees.
Next thing I knew, I was let go. By this time, the job market was quickly drying up, and I spent a long time collecting unemployment checks, and trying to find another, similar job to no avail.
I finally found work with Apple Mac systems. Wow, what a difference! Problem is, it's a small mom and pop place that's hanging on by a shoestring. My hours got cut back to part-time recently, because he couldn't make ends meet otherwise. It's really disappointing more folks haven't yet discovered the things Apple has done/is doing with OS X.
But anyway, here in the present, I see the I.T. job market SLOWLY starting to open back up, but when I read the job descriptions, my stomach churns. I don't even want to apply for most of them! It just seems like signing up to administer hundreds (or thosands?) of users on Exchange email while helping develop roll-outs of the latest MS technologies is like signing one's death warrant.
This DRM garbage is just another nail in the coffin, the way I see it. I can just imagine the fun it'll be explaining to the higher-ups why everyone's locked out of hundreds of important documents because Joe Schmoe encrypted them and then got laid off/fired/took a vacation/whatever. It's already insane enough trying to keep up with all these security fixes (and fixes for broken fixes!), stop the floods of email from woms/virii, and all the other MS headaches.
Obviously, there are still plenty of I.T. folks out there happy and willing to take on these jobs, risks and all. But maybe all my experience has made me too jaded? I'm about to throw in the towel. I don't have nearly enough "real world experience" using the OS's I see as superior solutions (Solaris, Linux, BSD, etc.) to get a decent paying job supporting/administering them. I spent too much time in the MS camp for that. I think I can handle the Mac OS X support quite well, but nobody's hiring for that. MS's current offerings give me the creeps....
I keep a collection of Microsoft Jargon, the MSFT equivalent of the Jargon File. Many words and phrases are so commonday right now, that it's hard to consider it jargon anymore. Many terms are adopted at other corps as well, like BizDev and config.
Among my favorites are Buzzowrd Bingo and FYIV.
It was in his TPS report.
Why is EVERY STORY turning into a shot at Microsoft at some point? Is it jealousy because they have made millionaires and billionaires of many of their rank and file employees?
Just give it a rest, and focus on News for Nerds and Stuff that Matters for a bit.
Well, I'm sure everyone can think of plenty of things to spend $10.05 on at Amazon.
But if all you really want is the book, try overstock.com
Is it just me or does this sound like a nonfiction version of the first couple of chapters of Microserfs? That was a great book(along with all of copelands), i may have to check this out.
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
You guys post Amazon referral links in every Slashdot book review. How much money do you make off it? I'm just curious.
So, based on the review the employees of Microsoft seemed to be of the opinion that Microsoft was good at a local leve but not good at a global level.
This is consistent with my long experience with Micrsoft development... some piece of Microsoft's software and tools are really good, others are bad, but never is there any kind of overarching consistency and philosophy. Even parts of Win32 itself aren't consistent with other parts... everything seems to be developed in a fairly isolated environment and crammed together at a higher level into a final product.
My own experience with an ex-Microsoft employee was very telling. I worked with him only briefly, and he was a really sharp guy who had worked on the NT kernel and SQL Server for several years. He had good ideas and a penchant for simplicity that seemed very un-Microsoft-like.
Interestingly, I learned some really interesting things about the Microsoft environment. The first was when I asked why "Internet Connection Sharing" and "RAS" were so buggy and bad. His reply was that the good people were all working on NAT for the server OS's. We repeated this conversation on several topics.
The other thing that was very telling was that MS does not use Source Safe in-house. No wonder... it's awful. Apparently thay have an in-house source control/configuration management solution which works much better... and yet they sell Source Safe.
From what I can tell as an outsider, the real genius of Microsoft is at these lower levels (and places like Microsoft Research) and that genius gets diluted or corrupted at a higher level of trying to integrate all the pieces of the world's largest software monopoly ^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h company.
This sounds like an interesting book.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
I've been contracting for MS for years, and it gets so tiring seeing this. Normal people (normal for me means having a life outside MS, seeing it as just another job, not a lifestyle) that, once joining the full-time staff, occupy a chunk of their day just refreshing that MS Money page, checking the weekly, quarterly, and yearly, then hitting the calculator, then loudly voicing how much they could've made if they had only joined up a year earlier, blah blah blah.
Does this happen everywhere (other public companies), and I'm just seeing the MS side of things?
Posting anon so's my only current cash supply doesn't get cut off by a certain bored stock-staring manager...
Which raises the big, big questions: Why is it that they are writing all this great, quality, robust code, but releasing/selling all these crappy, bloated, consistently insecure products? Are they hiring good programmers and keeping them working on stuff they'll never release just to keep them off the market?
If you think the allegations of bad security of Microsoft are all about sloppy coding, then you haven't been paying attention. You can have the best checking for coding flaws, check the bounds of all input buffers and all that, and still have horrible security. The bad security of Microsoft products comes from decisions that are out of the coders' hands. The basic design decisions are where the flaws start - like choosing to make the running of attachments the default setting in an e-mail client - which is mainly a problem because the macro languages of content viewers like Word and Excel allow people to do things a macro language for an office tool should never be able to do - like open and write files to the disk in a manner outside the document's normal File/Save method. The decision not to sandbox the office tool macros is not a coder's fault. It's a very high level design decision, and one that's fed by marketting - it makes the tool more powerful at the expense of security.
The ugly truth about computer security is that it's a pain in the ass. It gets in the way of making programs be easy and intuitive. Microsoft consistently chooses to place the glitter and showoff factor at a higher priority than security. If something is insecure, but it makes the system seem nifty, they'll put it in.
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
Thanks for pointing that out. I'm a subscriber because I don't mind supporting something I read on a daily basis, but this will be my last subscription to Slashdot if they're going to be promoting shit like that. What a slap in the face.
I could have sworn Microsoft was a monolith... It said "All These Architectures Are Yours, Except x86. Attempt No Landing There."
-B
He'd be outside living in a cardboard box. :0) The climate of software industry wasn't always as "laid back" as it is these days. There were times when people could make a million bucks a year by working 120 hour weeks. Heck, if someone told me I can make this much by working this much, you can bet your ass I'd sustain the stress. Then I'd take a three year vacation. :0)
I have worked with people who thought 80 hours a week made them better programmers, but from my perspective, they were so worn out that they got less done. Managers saw the long hours and were impressed by their dedication and loyalty, but all I saw was people spending hours on trivial problems because their brains were so fogged they were incapable of the five minutes of thought that would have pointed out a better solution.
I have no doubt all these Microsoft people thought they were hotshots, and thought all their coworkers were hotshots, but they define hotshot by long hours, and that only impresses clueless managers and other long hour hotshots.
When the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem looks like nails. Screwdrivers -- who needs 'em?
When the only capability you have is long hours of coding, every problem looks like a long slog of coding. Thinking and designing -- who needs it?
Infuriate left and right
Brilliant trolling as always, ccats.
I think one of the more interesting books on the Microsoft culture is Show-Stopper! by G. Pascal Zachary detailing the development of Windows NT. The book is not so much about the nitty-gritty details of the OS but about the team, led by Dave Cutler, that developed it and the impact it had on their individual professional and personal lives.
What really bothers me is that someone can
believe that working so many hours is productive.
I doubt it would have made much of a difference
if he limited himself to 50 hours.
If you work more 10 hours in a day, you'll probably spend the next morning correcting your mistakes.
mmmmmm, yeah, that's so very much more better and enlightened!
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
GO HERE
it's some word made up to represent something whoreabull, that must be done/dumb anyway?
that's the meaning we get from listening to the georgewellian fuddite corepirate nazis using the term in their ?pr? ?firm? scriptdead hypenosys speeches.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Are they hiring good programmers and keeping them working on stuff they'll never release just to keep them off the market?
No, they are hiring good programmers and working them so hard that the envisioned great, quality, robust code reeks of employee burn-out.
That Microsoft is staffed by excellent developers and generally run by excellent managers is evident from books like Code Complete, which has some fun stories about the development of Excel.
.Net - but they are not abstract enough to build sophisticated applications on without large amounts of reinvention. This was explained to me by a project manager at a large bank in Brussels who had seen 150m Euro spent trying to build a web application using MS technology (MSQ, MTS, COM+, etc.)
The fact is that this does not appear to be enough to make really good software.
Microsoft's software has certain specific issues. First, it is too monolithic: it consists of large vertical packages. There are horizontal layers - like Win32 and
The second problem is that Microsoft make their software too complex. Complexity is fun for technicians and programmers and marketing people, but it's a serious handicap in real life: what succeeds is simplicity, but the kind of simplicity that comes from honest and determined removal of functionality. A good example: I plug a USB mouse into my Win2k system, and see 5 dialog boxes appear before it works. Indeed, I even get to confirm the download of a digitally signed driver. On another system (Linux), I plug it in, the mouse cursor appears, and it works.
Large, over complex pieces of software is a serious problem. Intelligence and hard work are effectively wasted, because they are spent managing the complexity that results, instead of creating real value (namely good abstracted horizontal layers and excellent designs).
The reason for these two issues comes, I believe, from the fact that the company is too large and wealthy, ironically. It can afford to throw unlimited numbers of the best developers at problems. It can afford to feel the pain of writing millions of lines of code when a hundred thousand would be possible.
The best software comes from small, starving teams, who have to scrape the last bit of ingenuity from their brains to turn that million-line problem into a 10k problem.
Software is my business, and this is my opinion based on 20 years of writing the damn stuff. Just my 2c.
Ps. "Code Complete" was the best book on programming ever written. It almost made me send my CV to Microsoft.
Ceci n'est pas une signature
Its the only application from MS that's worked since v1.0.
What is this Microsoft you keep talking about ?
I just love it when the mods god INSANE.
So Microsoft worked the guy so hard it damaged him, they they reclassified him so his insurance could continue? How nice of them! Of course, that was, more than likely, the cheap way out for Microsoft. After all, working you employees till the are badly damaged does not look good when presented to a jury and/or a judge.
"Work weeks of 120 hours, and sometimes only 80 (he "thought he was on vacation" when that happened) eventually led to chronic fatigue and insurance problems for Ian. In those days, he says, "Microsoft was still small enough that that once you were in, you were really in." Microsoft short circuited his insurance policy's depletion by giving him a job that he could do even while weakened, so he could remain covered by the company health plan while he recovered -- in other words, the sort of thing that a Big Faceless Corporation might not be expected to do."
"Carter joined Microsoft when the company had a few hundred employees and called itself MicroSoft"
Probably the only thing belonging to MS that was ever case sensistive.
Live web cams
I'm usually not pro-Microsoft. In fact, normally, I'm biased against them. But, it's good to occasionally be reminded of the way things are up there. Kinda brings me back to an almost neutral point. Sometimes I just get the wrong picture in my mind. It's nice to have that picture changed.
Stop the Slashdot effect! Don't read the articles!
Deliver 60%, make up for the remaining 40% with marketing, doublespeak, and lies.
Healthcare article at Kuro5hin
Actually, they are an aggregate of monoliths. Jupiter is doomed.
Yeah, offtopic, but I'm tired today, and it's just friggin' Microsoft, for Cliff's sake.
--- Ban humanity.
1. It ain't "Office Space": people really do address issues properly, at the level of the issue, no fakey-fake bullshit.
.NET. At no point did anyone ever say: "hey, our plan is to fuck everybody else up and line our own pockets." (Well, I heard a mid-level manager and Gates say once that the explicit goal is for people to *ONLY* think of Microsoft when they think of XML). People sincerely try to produce good but the end result is always the same: same old evil shit.
:-)
2. There's a real "Rosemary's Baby" thing going on: everybody sorta knows they company is increasing the quantity of Evil in the world. We just liked it. I think a lot of companies are like that, but the difference is Microsoft is highly successful at it.
3. It is better to have shitloads of money than almost anything else. Loads of stuff is de rigeur. You cannot underestimate the effect this has on your daily psychology - everyone has an Amex with no limit, unlimited cell minutes, lots of travel.
4. The evil that is produced does not occur at the individual level, somehow, it's just a product of everybody or somebody I didn't meet. I saw Whistler become XP and Server 2003, and I saw NGWS become
To sum up: "Evil" is another word for "money". And it's better to have money than not to have money. And it's more fun to be evil than to be a saint. But the final check is a bitch
They call them "action requireds". Exactly as written!
A perfect example of this fragmentation is in the application installers. Compare the installers for MDAC vs. .NET Framework vs. SQLServer, vs. any other MS application. I have also seen patches that are very different too. There is the typical hotfix type installer, but then every now and again you will see a patch for something like a service pack for a more obscure MS application and it is obvious that it came from a completely different department with little or no "corporate identity scrubbing" beforehand. Is this a good or bad thing? I don't know, but I have long had the impression that every MS app I use was from a completely department with little global consistancy.
SCO.com uses Linux
Uhh . . . the page renders as a blank.
I would need a lot more than stock options and a relaxed atmosphere to work 80-120 hours a week. Thats seriously bad for your health. I could do that for a few months, if I was going to make a few hundred thousand in the end. I'd have to live in the office, so it had better have a health club with swimming pools and all the works, good food (not well stock snacks, I'm talking about a real kitchen with chefs and stuff) and I would definately take lots of breaks to visit the 'entertainment complex'. I work around 40 hours now, I'm getting burned out on that.
TallGreen CMS hosting
Actually, the plural of "radius" is "radii" or "radiuses". Either form is acceptable.
"Quoting famous computer scientists out of context is the root of all evil (or at least most of it) in programming." - K
I thought that things like microsoft don't have a reflection ?
"It's so convenient to have a system where everyone is a criminal" - A. Hitler
Doesn't change the fact they're their own developers worst enemies. Doesn't change the fact the company relies misinformation and threats to sell it's products.
Why not drop the price of XP home and professional to 80 and 120 dollars respectively. It's a reasonable price concidering there is no competition, yet?
I had an internship at the Redmond campus in the mid 90's. The perks are good, the pay was good, the food was cheap and pretty good, the free arcade games were great, the facilities of course were great. I even loved the weather. But the Bill-devotion was really spooky. People talked about 'when Bill first came into my life', kinda like he was J.C. And these were program managers who had only met him briefly. The other thing that bugged me: calendar devotion. It was clear that we were to ship ON TIME, this meant agressively dropping any and all features that got in the way. Even pretty key features could be dropped. "Shipping on time, shipping often" was the way to get more people to "throw their wallets at us". The quality of the software not central. I think this really makes a lot of business sense. But what I learned is, this perpective takes some of the joy out of creating software.
A real user posted that some time ago. I have to tell you the recent spate of AC copies has made me pretty much leary of ever modding up an AC, at least without doing a search for some of the content.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
i had the pleasure of spending a week on the main redmond campus this year. some of the more publicized elements of the culture were evident from the start: refreshments, flip flops, ping pong, late hours.... the people i met (dozens of mid-managers and developers) had an obvioulsy honest passion for what they were working on. development, not sales people, would routeintly take an hour out of their day to expound of the virtues of release X, or ask about the problems my company was facing and what we would like to see change in product X. /.ers like to generalize MS to windows, office and their monopoly as if that makes everything easy. MS has many, many products that have to compete directly with competitors. the people building these products are behind them with an almost fanatic, cult like zeal. would kill for that kind of allegience.
Hmmmmm yes Microsoft in the mirror. Mirror, mirror on the wall.......... you'll say what I want to hear....... your in my wallet after all......... the sound of lies are a sweet to the ear.
My karma is not a Chameleon.
just hope someone mods you down
'nuff said
complete with sudden, transient wealth
For somebody who was with Microsoft in the early days, the wealth should not have been transient. This was not a flash-in-the-pan eighteen-month-lifecycle dot-com. Once her options vested (after four years?) she should have exercised.
Well, hey, I didn't spend all those years playing Dungeons and Dragons and not learn a little something about courage.
..when it was called Microserfs.
Apparently timothy hasn't visited the upper left corner of the map in the past 6 months.
"But the Bill-devotion was really spooky. People talked about 'when Bill first came into my life', kinda like he was J.C. "
And how's that any different than the S.J. cult over at Apple? Or any other company, for that matter?
Anwyays, this was on the Excel team. And that could explain this other part:
From what I remember, at that time Excel and Word were pretty much the "elite" teams within MS. The design teams were extremely well respected and I think could get whatever they wanted in terms of resources they thought they needed to get their jobs done. For example, they were still using a Borland software development platform to develop Excel, at a time when Borland was a bitter enemy to MS overall.So Stewart's description may well be accurate for his experience, but it may not be the typical or even average case.
And of course, since then, I have to wonder if the quality has been maintained. Sure, the actual programmers really gave a damn about quality, and poured their heart and soul into the product, but they still lived a the mercy of -- what were they called -- the "program directors"? These were non-programmers whose job was to hand papers to the developers telling them what features to implement. Doesn't sound like the best long-term prospect for quality, does it? Furthermore, at the time I was there, they were just finishing up the OLE integration -- which my mentor on the Excel team described as "the worst thing that ever happend to Excel"...
"Orthodoxy is unconsciousness" - Orwell
as soon as you bulleave mostly in monIE, you are off topic? tell 'em robbIE?
"People cared about their code being as bug free as possible and were willing to sacrifice their weekends and social lives in order to write the best code they could."
Assuming this is true, then you have to wonder why the Windows operating system currently has so many security issues. Either Microsoft DOESN'T hire the best and the brightest, or the best and the brightest are over-ruled and ignored by those in management due to other "priorities".
you can bet your highly mortgaged .asp it does. that softwar gangster stuff is .compairabull to what was going on in the garmeNT disstricked weigh before you were somebodIEs deduction.
Maybe the products aren't really crappy and consistently insecure. At least, not any more than those of any other company. It just so happens that the products are orders of magnitude more comlex (read: bloated) than anything else on the market, and they are used by orders of magnitude more people.
"Faith strikes me as intellectual laziness." -Robert A. Heinlen
Exactly.
Yeah, and if Copernicus would have become a geocentrist later in his life, this "important fact" would be quite an argument dismissing heliocentrism, right ?
Fuckin' jerk.
From afar it looks like Microsoft has a lack of partitioning of functionality. Everything is embeded in everything else. It is so bad that ( According to Gates under oath at least --Gates would not lie to us would he? ) if you remove the media player you break the OS.
Open source has partioning of functionality forced on them. The code is written by volunteers all over the world. Functionaly has to be cleanly partitioned to make this work.
Religion is the main cause of atheism.
Well, I was, but the point was simply to give a counter example where over-design is not useful.
Perhaps I should have compared WinXP with Win2K as regards the USB driver businesses.
The point remains: Microsoft products tend to be exceedingly complex for the wrong reasons.
Ceci n'est pas une signature
"dissected Microsoft's corporate culture to figure out Microsoft's financial success."
This is Ground Control to Major Clue.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
Reading lightly, it's easy to get the impression that Microsoft hires only smart, competent people. Less-than-stellar managers and co-workers are mentioned in here, but mostly they're summed up with short, dismissive descriptions. I wonder whether this is more out of a good-natured desire to accentuate the positive or an illustration of our litigious society and fear of professional retribution. I would have enjoyed reading much more about what made them so awful, not out of shadenfreude, but out of simple curiosity, and to know how the vaunted Microsoft management machine dealt with them in the long term.
I'm a former MS employee with ADD/ADHS who was forced out by a manager at MSN.Com with a complex for anyone who was smarter than him. I was subjected to numerous civil rights violations that would make you all want to vomit.
One of which was a MSN Security moron who spent every waking moment abusing his security privelages trying to set me up to be fired. Fortunately, his plan backfired, he got caught, in the act, trying to set me up and was fired.
The Idiocy at MSN.Com would astound you.
That and I took the fall for a beta product (that was used for MSN.Com) which I told numerous managers that was not production ready.
This manager pushed this product into production to appease the 'customer' but blamed me for it's failure. This was even after all my objections about this product. In addition he kept trying to get me in trouble after all the extra hours I needed to spend supporting this beta product, were not 'approved' by him.
I plan to write a 'Tell All' book about this and more issues of idiocy and what it's like to work under such idiocy.
I also plan to sue M$ for $20-$50 Million US and donate the majority of the proceeds to ADD/ADHD charities.
Stay tuned....
Wow! I knew the Gerhardt mentioned in the review when I contracted at MS for MSN 1.0! He seemed a cool guy, though his health problems at the time kept him away more than he was there.
Small world... Perhaps I do have to read the book?
- -
Are you an SF Fan? Are you a Tru-Fan?
This is such bullshit. It's only spouted by people who either have 'too much' money, or no chance of EVER having enough. It's very much the line repeated by, say, beautiful people. Wah wah! Poor little me. I don't know what to do. People 'don't like me'. Cry me a fucking river. All things considered, it is far better, by leaps and bounds, to have too much, than not enough.
Wah wah. I'm 30 and I can retire. Oh no, whatever will I do with myself now? Overall, I think all these complainers who find themselves in such 'unfortunate' situations ARE probably right, but not for the reasons they think. They DO have too much money, and not enough imagination or drive.
"Hot lesbian witches! It's fucking genius!"
That Microsoft does indeed try to write the best software they can. Honestly take a look at how far their products have come since even 1990. It's amazing. You can begrudge them all you want but I seriously believe that MS isn't as bad as the /. crowd thinks.
Try viewing the source...
observe how microsoft's stock has significantly diverged from the nasdaq index
since they reported their last quarter results
I once worked with a guy that had been a coworker at MS in the mid '80's. He recalled hearing a hugh uproar and running down the hall expecting to see a face-smashing fight in progress, only to find Steve Ballmer giving a presentation in his normal tone of voice.
4 hours of creativity
additional 2 hours of code review
additional 2 hours reading work related stuff (hopefully not slashdot).
The working 14 hours a day on a programming project is unsustainable. Especially if you're working with people who have a life. It can work for small teams of young programmers for a "while". Especially if they are inspired.
Of those to whom much is given, much is required.
Don't be offended if I suggest you don't enter;-)
"It's good to know that Slashdot is promoting a practice that is causing HUNDREDS of THOUSANDS of techs and developers to LOSE THEIR JOBS"
OR: If you're 'Offshore' (whatever that means) you could say they are providing people with jobs; just not in the USA.
Why do you think you have the right to a good standard of living just because you are American? Like the previous guy said, trying competing instead of whining!
The real monopoly here is not entirely due to MS trading practices (nefarious as they are) but the monopoly of individuals' headspace.
I find it kind of scary to hear so many people bitch and moan about the crappiness if MS software but who stop listening as soon as you offer them an alternative.
People do what they do for free because they want to, so they will probably do a better job at coding and getting the job done =)
Yeah, that's why the GNU Hurd is a decade old and useless. Woo hoo! It's amateur hour at the software workshop!
Funny that, my ancient, secondhand Libretto runs Win 95, and I still use it for email and web surfing and Excel spreadsheets when I'm sat at the airport.
Guess how often it 'crashes'?
Oh go on.
Never. In two years.
>Maybe the products aren't really crappy and consistently insecure.
;)
You shut your goddamn mouth! This is slashdot!
Windows NT was last decade. I meant the NT line of kernels, upon which home and corporate Windows has been running.
Linux won't even boot up on my laptop without apmd crashing, no matter the distro I try.
"Sufferin' succotash."
I bet most just goof off, browse, check their stocks for most of the day, then work 4-5 hours at night when it's nice and quiet. On tough days they'd be sitting through meetings most of the day and then work at night.
People need to rest. There are very good reasons for sleep and researchers are only starting to find them. There are good reasons for the sabbath/weekend and stuff like that too.
The US people aren't more productive than the western europeans on a per hour basis. They just work more hours. As for product quality. It sure doesn't look like more hours = better quality. You can almost see certain German products overflow with quality - esp when you open em up and see the attention to detail and see signs that the designer of a part seems to have considered 1001 different things which is why this thing has a notch here and that other thing looks like that, etc.
While the US folk _may_ get more money, they don't get as many holidays or breaks. Given that the US people don't live longer than the western europeans, I wonder who is getting the better deal.
The US CEOs are definitely getting a good deal. Great CEO packages plus employees who put in 50-100% more hours for 10-25% more pay AND can be sacked at a drop of a hat.
A Microsoft zealot who runs BeOS, Linux and OS/2 as dual boots. And a Microsoft zealot who has 2 Macs.
Get real. Joe Blow can use any of these operating systems, the differences between them aren't very important. The applications are the important thing.
So AC, tell me, how can 'luck' apply to a digital binary operating system?
I think this can be extended to almost any job.
I'm a sysadmin by trade, and we crammed implementing an enterprise firewall (yeah, I know), NAT conversion, connecting sites with fiber, constructing a datacenter and finishing a Windows 2000 conversion into two months. The younger (salaried) people on my team consistently put in 80 hour or more weeks. The older people always checked out after 8 hours every day. That was stressful, I can't imagine doing 120 hours a week.
Qualitas edurus commercium, nullus penitus net rimor, nullus deus beneficium
I thought it was going to be a book on cocaine use in the workplace.
When I bought a PC (Pentium-166) in 1996, it came preinstalled with Win95. It crashed out of box. Thank Slackware for providing me with a stable OS for this machine.
./ FUD", but that's because its true. Consider yourself lucky if Win95/98/ME don't give you troubles. You are lucky enough to have found a combination of hardware that doesn't have shitty drivers, you're lucky enough that your filesystem has not become corrupted yet, and you're lucky that your apps don't cause the entire OS to crash. If your copy of Win95/98/ME doesn't crash at least 5 times a day, consider yourself lucky. Maybe, by now, most of the driver issues have been corrected by hardware manufacturers, if they didn't abandon the drivers long ago.
My next machine preinstalled with Win98 was just as bad. I didn't use IE because it would crash the OS. Thank Redhat for getting me through these times.
Win2k was the first stable consumer OS from Microsoft. I upgraded the same machine that was running Win98 and it was finally an acceptable OS.
Granted, I also have a second hand laptop that runs Win95 without problems, but I hardly use that thing and it doesn't even have all the drivers loaded (still using generic VGA driver even).
This may be "the usual