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Microsoft Employees Critical Of Their Employer
bonch writes "BusinessWeek is running an article on internal unrest at Microsoft from their own employees. 'Once the dream workplace of tech's highest achievers, it is suffering key defections to Google and elsewhere... Much of the sharpest criticism comes from within. Dozens of current and former employees are criticizing -- in BusinessWeek interviews, court testimony, and personal blogs -- the way the company operates internally.' In related news, Steve Ballmer has pledged to make changes inside Microsoft to avoid the embarrassingly long development cycle of Vista, including a 'revamping of the engineering and the processes.' Is it too late?"
Sounds like pretty much everywhere I've worked which at one time seemed a dream job. Eventually things change. Workers set in their ways and expectations grumble the loudest. Truth may be, it still may be a dream place to work, it's just that many people don't like change, where others thrive on it (hint: Change is often an opportunity for promotion or to shift into another position you prefer.
Like my experiences, I fully expect some people will anonymously gripe, but still stay put because the change of finding a new job, fitting into a new workplace, doing work in new and different ways is often a bigger challenge then standing pat.
As for Ballmer, he's going to have to go through the kinds of things IBM has done many times over the past few decades. Competition is out there (notably Linux) and Microsoft really is stagnating. Windows Vista may well be their Edsel.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
As the saying on leadership goes: "A fish rots from the head down." If the report about the chair is true, then I would suspect that this is where it begins.
(Again, we don't know if the story is true...)
Try to hack my 31337 firewall!
This is no surprise. Microsoft has gotten so big that they have become a jack of all trades but no longer a master at anything. When you try to do everything you expand so large that its hard to control the growth of the company and management policies. Microsofts sole power was in being able to compensate people well but people are leaving not because of money but because they do not like the job. This could be a big problem for Microsoft and we will watch Google and other companies slowly eat up some of the top devs from MS.
All companies have internal employee gripes about working there with very few exceptions. Those exceptions tend to be companies that are flush with cash and are able to treat their employees as they should be treated. But when it comes to "brass tacks", the niceties are the first thing to go. Now, I should also say that I can't stand Microsoft or Windows, I think they're both shite. But, Windows isn't going to suddenly disappear and niether is Microsoft. Witness the auto industry. There are companies out there that make shitty autos but you don't see them dying out. You also don't see consumers russhing out to buy a new car every time the auto industry says to do so. The same thing applies to Windows. As much as Microsoft might wish that people will flock to Vista (whatever flavor) the real truth, and they know this, is that there are people who are STILL going to be running Windows 95 out there if it still works for them. So, none of this article warrants gloating about the demise of Microsoft. It ain't gonna happen. If it were, then Chevy should have disappeared decades ago.
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
With some of its key breakthrough features gone, Vista's improvements include better handling of peripheral devices, such as printers and scanners, and cutting in half the time it takes to start up. Those are needed improvements, and there's no doubt that hundreds of millions of copies will be sold as people upgrade to new PCs. But the changes are hardly the stuff of cutting-edge software engineering.
Indeed. Microsoft is going to have to rely heavily on its marketing dept. in order for Vista to sell. I mean, seriously, what does it really have to offer that is a big improvemnt on XP, or even 2000 for that matter. Sure, the fanboys will all buy it becasue it is the "new and exciting MS Operating System" and joe sixpack will get it with his new computer, but what businesess will be able to justify the cost of a meaningless upgrade.
If MS is really going to be pushing better printer and scanner compatibilty, a new GUI, and faster startup times as the big features in Vista, they might as well just let all of their top programmers go to google and start hiring all of the top marketing people in the world to replace them.
To put this in perspective MS has 61,000 employees. If MS has 200 disgruntled employees then that's 0.003% of their staff. At a former company we had 150 employees and it's safe to say that 10% of them were disgruntled, if not more. If you want to find a disgruntled employees, look not at Microsoft but at the DMV, Delta and Northwest airlines. /devils advocate
As a soon-to-graduate senior, I can't possibly express how much I want to avoid Microsoft, but I can try. For one, you have anti-compete clauses. Although from what I've seen and heard these are pretty common, but MS is in everything. I think the only IT industry they haven't infiltrated is porn, and while it is a very richeous and worthwhile industry, that isn't what I'm trying to do with my life. Combine that with the fact that their development is very dictated: 'this is what we want, we just need manpower to actually type the code in.' Microsoft, you used to be cool. What happened to you? You fell off and started making things quick and cheap (no so quick in Vista's case) to make as much money as possible. While this may be a smart approach to business, it isn't a smart approach to customers. These problems are what net you all the criticism
Perception is the thin dividing line between reality and fiction.
All empires fall.
(We can only hope)
Microsoft was *the* place to work only if you really cared about money and had never seen a Macintosh.
From my experience, when a project is past its planned deployment date and the team and/or leadership is revisiting questions that should have been settled before coding started success is unlikely. They are THRASHING.
Just this week I am observing an unnamed COTS data management system 2 weeks from deployment, several million dollars worth of hardware waiting for it, and the software just plain doesn't work. It is one thing when they audit the config looking for packaging/install bugs, quite another when the flown in experts are proposing a complete shakeup of the entire application and physical architecture.
When the people fear their government, there is tyranny; when the government fears the people, there is liberty.
It's just like Apple when Jobs was ousted and Scully took over. The pinheads don't know how to inspire/lead/challenge the techies.
Same thing with HP when it was no longer a place for engineers, run by engineers.
You can probably find the same pattern repeating at lots of high tech companies.
There are critics inside every organization... I bet there are critics inside Google too. This is nothing new, other than they got some folks inside Microsoft to talk about it.
Wait a while....they'll be writing the same article about Google.
Nearly everyone where I work is critical of their employer too. People bitch no matter what.
Join the Slashcott! Feb 10 thru Feb 17!
"So maybe it's more of a corporate America thing/large company thing, than a Microsoft thing."
Its more just a capitalism thing. Its just a basic fact of life that people want to make money. Most people want to make the most money they can. The way you make the most money you can in a corporation is to one way or another surpass your coworkers, to get the credit for successes weather you deserve it or not, and shift blame for failure away from you even if you deserve it.
If you are good at playing this game you get promoted, you get more stock, you get bigger bonuses. There is just a vast difference in compensation between working people and those at VP and above. Top executives used to make 30X what workers did in the 80's, they now make 400x. VP is similar though not quite as big a multiple.
Idealist geeks don't play this game well. They are just glad to get a paycheck and if someone lets them sit at their computer in peace. Its a key reason the people in marketing and sales tend to rocket in to upper management, that and geeks tend to lack social skills to survive in management.
The best way to make money in a company is everyone works together and make great products and everyone makes lots of money and then there is a lot to spread around, Microsoft used to be like this when the stock just kept going up and everyone got rich on it even if you got less than others. Google is like this now. That is a "dream" company, everything is going right and everyone is making a lot of money.
The problem sets in when it starts getting hard to make your killing. If all of a sudden stock options don't mean certain riches, raises are harder to come by and offshoring is in full swing political infighting and morale problems are just the inevitable result.
If there is a limited pool of wealth the motivated and greedy opt out of working together and team success, instead they start playing politics to insure they climb and if necessary they do it over the bodies of the people around them, most of whom end up laying on the floor with a knife in their back. Competition is sometimes a great motivator but when it reaches a certain pitch inside a company it stops being a positive and turns in to pure corrosion.
Most young geeks simply don't grasp that this game is even going on around them, and its why people in their office are driving expensive sports cars while they settle for a couple percent raise a year for 80 hour work weeks.
@de_machina
Its more just a capitalism thing. Its just a basic fact of life that people want to make money. Most people want to make the most money they can. The way you make the most money you can in a corporation is to one way or another surpass your coworkers, to get the credit for successes weather you deserve it or not, and shift blame for failure away from you even if you deserve it.
Well, the basic problem is one of organizational structure. You have a large company divided into a number of profit and cost centers. Profit centers are expected to justify their budgets based on revenue, and cost centers are supposed to lose as little money as possible. Each of these departments is expected to justify their budget more or less independant of the rest of the company. It is this last bit-- this assumption that departments are independant that leads to these turf wars and, in the extreme case, the sort of problem I ran into at Microsoft.
I don't see it as a Capitalist problem per se because I can imagine companies structured in a way that might discourage these sorts of problems. I.e the company would make *more* money, not less if these problems were solved.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
Microsoft's has always been a catch-up company.
Their formula for success has always been integration niched me-too products combined with four parts ruthless competition that skirted the lines of legality.
The problem with morale in the company at this point is that they have so thoroughly captured the OS and business application market that they have no one to defeat and no one to catch up to.
Development groups in areas that were sewn up for the company ten years ago are not going to get top notch resources (money, material, or folks), will be discouraged from innovation, and will not receive compelling leadership. The reason is because all of that is bad for the bottom line. Never understimate how flat stock prices and the almighty market analysts can foist the most insanely suicidal practices on even the most profitable companies.
As soon as a viable competitor business competitor emerges, those groups will snap back to their usual rabid selves. (It will have to be a business competitor though, because it doesn't pay to steal business from a competitor that isn't getting paid, but that's another thread altogether...)
Also, I'd be willing to bet that in the areas where Microsoft has viable competition (gaming console market, internet services, etc.), the resources, leadership, and morale are much better.
"I don't see it as a Capitalist problem per se because I can imagine companies structured in a way that might discourage these sorts of problems. I.e the company would make *more* money, not less if these problems were solved."
I think maybe the point you are missing is you think Capitalism is just a company versus company game. It is just as much, and inherently a person versus person game. You have to apply the same competitive angst there is between Microsoft and Google and extrapolate it to the managers of all the teams in your office who are competing for market(mind) share within the company with the executives above them who are the customers. You have to apply it to the engineers on a team who are competing for a larger share of the options, bonuses, raises and plum assignments. The engineers are totally at the bottom of the heap and a lot less adept at and prone to play the game than you will find among everyone who has made the jump on to the rungs of the management ladder and also EVERY salesperson in the organization. If you want to see competition at its most vicious just look at how salespeople think and work.
@de_machina
...says Ballmer... "We won the desktop. We won the server. We will win the Web. We will move fast, we will get there. We will win the Web." When did Microsoft win the Server? I must not have been paying attention when they handed out that award! (I will give them credit for owning the desktop for the foreseeable future. However, I beleive the desktop will become less and less important in the future as more people use network appliances to accomplish most computing tasks.)
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
ever worked for a large firm (before or after) to compare your experiences at MS with?
I have worked for at least five and the experience is pretty much the same everywhere, except for one that was a wholly family-owned private bank (despite being rather large by the standards of the day).
I tend to chalk up the issues I have with large organizations due to the soulless nature of publically owned companies. If they have an owning management, that controls the fate of the organizations, their focus is less on internecine warfare between executives. The focus is more on doing business, which requires having and keeping quality employees, which requires loyalty and attention to their development. This kind of attitude spreads downward from the management and infects the whole organization. In both cases.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
Well, yeah, a guy who admitted that he would be working as an insurance saleman if it were not for M$ is not the best man to be running a tech company. Then again, M$ is not much of a tech company as it is a sales and marketing company.
You can see how nuts Balmer is from the article himself. The complaints are that people are not being rewarded by a company that's got poor organization and infighting that interferes with getting things done. His response is ludicrous:
Employees' complaints are rooted in a number of factors. They resent cuts in compensation and benefits as profits soar. They're disappointed with the stock price, which has barely budged for three years, rendering many of their stock options out of the money. They're frustrated with what they see as swelling bureaucracy, including the many procedures and meetings Chief Executive Steven A. Ballmer has put in place to motivate them. And they're feeling trapped in an organization whose past successes seem to stifle current creativity.
Worse is what he has to say about those problems:
"We have as excited and engaged a team of folks at Microsoft as I can possibly imagine," says Ballmer. "[Employees] love their work. ...[cites Xbox and MSN as successes and might as well have farted] says Ballmer. "We won the desktop. We won the server. We will win the Web. We will move fast, we will get there. We will win the Web."
Won the server? He's losing the desktop and what does that have to do with NOT PAYING PEOPLE WHEN YOU ARE BURSTING WITH MONEY or STUPID FUCKING INTERNAL SALES MEETINGS WHEN YOU SHOULD BE PUTTING OUT PRODUCT? Steve, baby, being second rate was good enough for Windoze 3.1 and 95. For all the money your company has you should have something on the desktop 6 times better than KDE, Gnome and all that have, but you don't. You've got a piece of shit that has not fundamentally changed in ten years. That and the bad attitude of thinking he can cram that second rate junk down people's throats is pure lunacy.
It is so over for that company and that's good. At last the closed source nighmare of the 80s can die. The greed heads and control freaks can go back to insurance sales and the business can revert to key banging and hacking among equals.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
The exodus of good employees from MS and their inability to attract top talent can be easily explained. Microsoft's stock price has been flat for the last five years.
People didn't flock to Microsoft from 1990 -2000 because it was such a wonderful place to work. They went there to get rich on stock options. Working for MS now is no different than working for GM or Dupont. The massive growth phase ended five years ago and will never return.
The reason people are leaving for Google can be explained by this
graph.
Frankly, working for a big corporation is not a dream. It's a crying shame. Do you think you have value to the corporation? Think again. Do you think loyalty is rewarded? Hardly. Look at the airline industry. All those United employees put in all those years, and in one day, their pensions were gone. Money, socked away for 20, 30, or 40 years. And that was part of their compensation.
Who's to blame? Wallstreet. Demands by investors. The press. If you're in this for the long haul, you're disrespected... and your stock price plummets. The market wants a quick return. You can't go around with 20 billion in assets, and maybe a 1 or 2 percent profit. The market won't like you. Stock will plummet, shareholders will vote out the directors, CEO will get fired.
It's just like revolving debt. The market doesn't respect savings. They only care about debt and the interest on the debt. If you're cash heavy, you're a target for breakup. So you have to carry a lot of debt as a poison pill. It's sad.
I think the joke you were looking for was, "Oceania was at war with Eastasia. Oceania had always been at war with Eastasia."
where the comment ends and sig begins
I would also point out that Apache runs on FAR more servers than IIS.
I'd like to point out that even in their heyday, Netscape didn't fool themselves into thinking they were 'winning' on the basis of the count of public-facing Internet websites.
Apache can run on any number of millions of Internet servers, serving up vanity pages and mom-and-pop retail sites.
The money is in corporate Intranet servers facing inward, to employees. And crummy site-counter statistics on the Web aren't even CAPABLE of counting those.
resigned
Yeah Monsters Inc has great hair, and Incredibles has fabric, but the charm of the movie isn't the CGI but the story. No, it's not like other have said as being "The secret life of /insert thinghere/", but of the importance of friendship, family, caring for others. That's what made them good. The CGI was just a way to tell the story (a very good way, mind you).
After all, even Luxo Jr wouldn't be as good without the parent lamp, and seeing the joy of a child within the actions of a small lamp. Otherwise it's simply animating a cone on a stick and a sphere. The story is the genius of the Pixar product, the CGI gives it believability.
Has Cars lost the touch? We will see. As others have said, the tailer is not as enticing as the previous movies.
"organizational model"
einhverfr, there is a simpler explanation of the same thing, in my opinion. Microsoft was never relationship oriented. Mentally, Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer are still the socially disfunctional teenagers they were when they started.
Microsoft has never been a trust-based company. Anyone who tries to manage without examining the quality of relationships must manage by constantly testing the limits of what he or she can push other people to do. "Testing the Limits" management makes employees feel disrespected, because they ARE being disrespected. Before, programming was so exciting that employees were willing to be abused. Now that is beginning to change.
Microsoft has always sold mediocre products. The company has always been organized around taking advantage of technical ignorance, and around examining just how little people will accept. Think how miserable it is to work at a company that never does a good job!
Microsoft Basic was the first major product. It was poorly implemented and poorly documented. For example, there was no way to write a strictly binary file! An ASCII Hex 07 character would ring the bell rather than be written to a file.
Microsoft Assembler was provided with manuals printed from a dot matrix original. The assembler was unreliable. It would sometimes just not produce the correct instructions. The world had to wait for Borland Turbo Assembler to get a reasonably good assembler.
In an hour of testing the first version of Windows NT, which I had bought, I found 3 pages of serious bugs. My money was totally wasted.
The first version of Microsoft Access had huge bugs.
Microsoft Word in Office 2000 sometimes destroys its own files. (Tip: Open the Microsoft Word file in Open Office and save it as a
ChkDsk.exe (Check Disk) supplied with Windows XP Professional has a log file parameter. ("/L:size NTFS only: Changes the log file size to the specified number of kilobytes. If size is not specified, displays current size.") However, according to Microsoft technical support, Chkdsk does not actually produce a log.
Many other Windows XP command line interface programs don't actually work completely with Windows XP. The CLI is very incomplete and toy-like.
Microsoft software has had incredible numbers of very severe security vulnerabilities and Microsoft has been very slow to fix them. The vulnerabilities have cost customers hundreds of billions of dollars. If Microsoft had to pay for the destructiveness of all the vulnerabilities, Bill Gates would be the poorest person in the world, instead of the richest. Microsoft is like the cigarette companies. If the cigarette companies had to pay the total cost of cigarettes, including medical bills, cigarettes would not be profitable. If Microsoft had to pay for the damages caused by its mediocre software, Microsoft would not be a profitable company.
Apparently in an effort to create copy protection, Microsoft designed Windows XP to save configuration data from most programs in one huge file called the Registry. If that file somehow becomes corrupt, it can be impossible to repair for a reasonable amount of money.
Microsoft is managed around taking advantage of technical situations rather than managed around trying to develop good products. Microsoft is, in that way, more an abuse company than a software company.