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.
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.
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.
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
What is this Microsoft you keep talking about ?
Sorry, all I remember are Afterstep, fvwm, Netscape and Motif. Oh, and xsnow. Hardly comparable to Windows 95 or MacOS 7.x.
Hell, I even remember the Windows 95 taskbar and right-click menu as being considered something that was copied from X window managers.
The taskbar came from NeXT; right-clicking goes back to PARC, I think.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
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!"
Hell, they didn't even do that. OS/2 Warp 3 had a taskbar when it was released in 1994. Yes, they probably borrowed the idea from CDE, but Windows95 definitely didn't "innovate" anything in that area. Hell, Microsoft has NEVER innovated any part of the computing world. They're rancid parasites who feed off the ideas of others and pervert it into their own product for personal financial gain. Can anyone name one useful feature that Microsoft has invented that wasn't prior art on some other platform?