Microsoft in the Mirror

Like any large enterprise, Microsoft is an aggregate, not a monolith. This is true not only of the company as a massive business entity made up of various committees, departments and divisions operating out of multiple campuses around the world, but also as a company in the original sense, a group of people working for a common purpose. Countless analysts have dissected Microsoft's corporate culture to figure out Microsoft's financial success. Karin Carter, an ex-Microsoftie herself, decided instead to write about how mid-level Microsoft employees view the place; there are programmers, middle managers, and handful of others here -- just 19 Microsoft employees (some, like Carter, former employees) with a range of academic and social backgrounds who ended up working for Gates and Ballmer's software company in "that drippy upper-left corner of the map." The result is Microsoft in the Mirror; read on for my review. Microsoft in the Mirror author Karin Carter pages 246 publisher Pennington Books rating 7 reviewer timothy ISBN 097252990X summary Revealing look at Microsoft from its employees, including war stories from the company's early days.

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.

Comments

MS in the mirror and embarrassment

[HungWeiLo]

Yes, nothing like having a real OS as primary, and having a MS box as a mirror to highlight some major embarrassing uptime stats.

Re:This really isn't a revelation....[OT]

[carpe_noctem]

Actually, the plural of "radius" is "radii" or "radiuses". Either form is acceptable.

Not a troll, a copy

[SuperKendall]

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.