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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
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.
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
You really can't afford to be that naive as a "soon-to-graduate senior" if you want a job of any kind. You're at the absolute bottem of the totem pole. You should be grateful and say, "thank you" to ANY company that will offer you any kind of job, especially Microsoft. As is, it sounds like you're going to be delivering pizzas with your newly minted degree.
Wow. No reason to be hatefull.
You do know that 98% of the cpus in use on the planet don't run Windows. Yes, the gas pumps, the VCR/DVD players, the television sets etc. all use microprocessors that don't run windows. The 8051, 68000, Dragon, Z-Logic, PIC are all systems that still require talented programmers.
For you to shred this guy is just un-called for.
As an experienced IT person, I gotta say that if you were a smart soon-to-graduate senior, you wouldn't be writing off a job at the largest, most well-respected, most stable company in the entire industry (and possibly the country).
As a experienced IT person I would hope your using the right tool for the right job. Windows doesn't fit in every situation (I'm not saying OSX/Linux/etc. does either). As far as Microsoft being well respected, you should admit that this is your own opinion and not that of the IT/Consumer industry as a whole.
No flame war intended.
It's just the normal noises in here.
"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.