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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.
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.
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."
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...
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)
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.
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
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.
I've been in many environments - in large, well known companies - where code written and checked by as few as one person reaches production. Having someone else check over code - not to mention actual formal code reviews - seems to still be a minority practice. :-(
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You cannot wash away blood with blood