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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?"
Also on BusinessWeek there's an interview with Ballmer where he dodges every question he's asked (and re-asked) regarding morale issues at Microsoft, competition, release delays with Longhorn/Vista, etc.
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/05_3Oddly he didn't jump around screaming "Developers, developers, developers!!!" this time around.
Quantum mechanics: the dreams that stuff is made of.
I have dealt with people at Microsoft in the past, and found that their problem is not with their engineers or with the guys in the trenches, but with the business development guys. Seriously, how many of them does it take to screw a lightbulb? It's pathetic ... So much schmoozing and nonsense, no focus on real results - everyone is always trying to get that one big deal, not focusing on the incremental stuff that is vital to actual innovation taking place.
... Which they can totally do, as evidenced by the tremendous amount of innovation seen in Office 12, for example ...
The best thing Microsoft could do is make a statement that they will stop issuing statements, and let their work/products speak for themselves
From my experience, reinvigoration of the company will require a pretty gut-wrenching shake-up. I've lived through some half measures where I work and so far they have not produced anything like previous performance.
I hate Microsoft and what they've done to the PC world, but they are one of the biggest software companies around with a large reserve of cash to fund future development. If they ever learn to truly innovate instead of acting to stifle competition, they have the resources to do great things.
Gotta have a dream, right?
Best regards.
The culture just isn't what it used to be, and besides that, people are getting burned out, considering the kind of hours we've kept for the last howevermany years. Not to mention that management has made some bad decisions lately that have hurt the company, and there's a murmur of concern going around that Cars is going to be Pixar's first ho-hum movie.
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you can possibly imagine.
Sounds like pretty much everywhere I've worked which at one time seemed a dream job.
Microsoft is different, if only in scale. These employees work on products that bring in a billion per month for their employer. Yet, these same employees only make market wages. It was only a few years ago, these employees were all but guaranteed from their options to become millionaires. Now, Microsoft is trying to up their profits on paper, so they're squeezing employees for that money. Nevermind that Microsoft is still making around a billion a month. And nevermind that Microsoft's lack of profit growth is directly attributable to those managers who are making a million a year in salary.
About 20 years ago we have various vendors come in and pitch their Big Iron to us. We hardly needed DEC to show up, because we already loved them. We had to let IBM show up because the boss always had a soft spot in his heart for them and people with suits and ties who know nothing about operations or programming think IBM=Answers.
So these IBM guys come in and pitch to us like they were made in the Gotti family. A few questions are fielded semi-informatively, but the tone said "listen you stupid moron, stop wasting our time, just buy the the thing because we know and you should know, there's nothing better and you're just a damn fool if you don't".
We didn't. Ironically we ended up with Pr1me, because our new software would run on it. IBM eventually went through a few years of real housecleaning, as everytime I tried to contact Sales regarding an order for an RS/6000, I got a different salesman or an answering machine with "I'm no longer with IBM please direct your call to ..." Finally getting the order through a district sales manager for the state(!) and even he had to be told what we were ordering and not to keep trying to tack on color monitors and laser printers we didn't want or need.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Sadly, the joke isn't as extreme as the actual answer:
/ 28/53298.aspx
http://blogs.msdn.com/ericlippert/archive/2003/10
According to that, the minimum is about 42 people to make any change. A lot of this is because of things like localisation issues. (One translator for each language...)
I worked at Microsoft for a few years. I never found it to be a dream workplace. Many of the largest complaints I had (that of feeling like I was the victim of interdepartment turf wars) turned out to be extremely widespread.
The basic problem is that despite a huge amount of effort on the part of senior management pushing a message of "help beyond your department," departments still have to justify budgets, and are very unwilling to cite cross-department contributions in this process. So you get a message of "go do this: it is important to the company" and then when you are done you get "I wish you hadn't taken the time out of studying for more MCP exams to make these admittedly great contributions."
The problem was so bad in my department that the General Manager went to great lengths to make himself available on the floor and break down any image of him as being inaccessible. And yet he was entirely unsuccessful in this endevour.
When I left, it became clear that my entire department was not long to remain in the US. About 2 months ago, they finally committed to lay off those in my department.
I never found Microsoft to be a dream place to work. Politics of the worst sort (yeah, politics are everywhere), and in particular failure to recognize outstanding performance lead many blue badges in my department to feel very unhappy with their jobs. In short, we never felt valued.
By nearly any account, I was a steller contributor. I was asked to provide leadership roles in various ways, from conducting training for my coworkers to acting as a technical lead in the response to the Blaster worm. Yet again, even though these roles were done at the request of management, I never felt that my contributions in these special projects was appreciated in any way, shape, or form. May have just been my department though.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
I was a Microserf in Support... that's right; not all Microserfs are developers.
Here are some problems with Microsoft:
1. Training - There's a phone; now go do that support stuff
2. Customer satisfaction surveys - Customers got mad when you had to tell them "Windows doesn't work that way". You had to get a 8 or 9 out of 9 on everyr survey or your manager would get mad. Unsupported product? Third-party issue? User error? Tough!
3. Managers - I had 5 managers in one year. One manager skipped free training because it interfered with "Survivor" on TV. Only manager had atechnical clue; the rest might as well have managed a pizza parlor
4. Co-workers - they regularly backstabbed contractors. Why? Because they could
5. No internal processes - Support engineers have to just make everythingm up. There are NO processes for escalation
I am glad to be gone from that madhouse
I tested hardware for Win98se, WinMe, Win2k & WinXP. And main annoyance I had with my job was that it was far too boring. I would often email in sick Monday, Tuesday, & sometimes Wednesday. When I came in, I was able to easily catch up and log all my test scores by Friday afternoon. The job was just too slack, and it showed with management who would take our entire team out to Hooters resturant, come back 2 or 3 hours later drunk off their asses. The boss would invite me to go with them, but I really dont like getting drunk in the early afternoon. We had mini-fridges in the lab and occasionally people would start drinking at noon.
.ini files which got Lotus Notes to work (call after call to internal support didnt work). My boss accused me of hacking the operating system, and I got dinged pretty bad on my evaluation. So while I did have some fun at MS, it set a bad example of conduct for future jobs.
While some may think this is great, it really creates horrible work ethics should you move on to a new job. Lots of young people thinking that this was normal, and when they moved onto a new job outside the company they might assume that its ok to eat, drink, sleep, & shower at work. This is basically what happened to me, I moved on and ended up getting fired from two jobs, for doing things that were considered very tame at Microsoft (swearing in a casual way, using email for non-business related purposes like talking a friend down the hall). I came really close to getting fired on my current job for creating a batch file to copy
Policy and proceedure are radically different at Microsoft compared to companies like Starbucks, or Blue Cross.
The irony for me was that MS was going to hire alot of entry level testing positions (they lost the perma-temp lawsuit). I didnt think I was qualified, but my boss pressed me to apply. I never got the job because im not very good at answering Brain Teaser type questions, if only the interviewers had asked me questions relating to my job, maybe I would have been hired. But most of the people in my lab, the ones who didnt really care about getting hired on full time, got hired full time. Including the potheads and alcoholics.
I had one guy who couldnt take the stress of working at MS get hired on full time, and he would duck into the parking lot to smoke pot for 2 hours when he told everyone he was over at the developers office testing. This one guy was responsible for testing Digital Video devices, and he was just too fucking stupid for words. The developer however was the smartest, nicest guy I ever met there.
As a former summer intern, I'll have to disagree. It's not just the people who have been there the longest who are complaining. I got out of the software sector, and hopefully eventually out of computers, largely due to my experiences with Microsoft (and a host of other reasons, but MS was emblematic).
Microsoft, as a company, is suffering from the same stuff its software suffers from: bloat. There are levels upon levels of management with no clear role as to what exactly it is they do. There are project leads of project leads of project leads and it's just one big terrific mess.
As a result, it takes forever to get anything done. Innovation doesn't really happen, and passion for the development of the product just doesn't exist. (I was a dev for Avalon (the presentation layer of Longhorn (Vista)))
If you want a job in the software sector, go google. My friend loves it there.
I beg to disagree.
I used to work at a software shop that did business apps on the one hand, and games on the other hand. Guess what ? Both are essentially the same job, with the same processes and quite a bit of skills in common, even if games are usually in C/C++, and Biz apps in another language. When you get down to it, it's setting specs and developping to them. The Artists are more of an issue than a fun factor, with their inate tendency to disregard technical constraints. But then again, you get that also with ergonomics / looks in biz apps, especially if they are web-based.
I found the level of maturity quite a bit higher with the biz apps developement people. Superficially, that does seem to mean less fun, but in the long run, that means fewer conflicts, more learning (vs grandstanding)... You even get to interact more with your users, and evolve your projects over time (vs "just" having magazine reviews and pewing out rushed patches).
I am not a developper, but if I were, I'd definitely go for the Biz Apps market.
The Cloud - because you don't care if your apps and data are up in the air.
If a company sitting on $50+ billion in cash has run out of time then Slashdot is a serious news organization.
Also, the emerging competition from Linux is not like you had with DR-DOS, OS/2 or anything like that. This is the one competitor Microsoft has ever had which is both serious and cannot be destroyed by targetting the vendor. This is fundamentally different than things in the past.
I question how much Microsoft's lack of success against Linux has to do with Open Source Magic(tm) verus just poor product positioning.
For years, Microsoft had great success with NT selling it as "Not Unix", but what they failed to realize was that in certain segments (finance, ISPs), there's a huge demand for something that "Is Unix", and Linux fit that bill on commodity hardware. When MS attempted to sell to these markets, they largely failed because they couldn't understand why the customers didn't see NT as the obvious replacement for something supposedly obsolete like Unix.
As a tangible example, SFU/Interix has been around since 1998 or so, but they've only recently started integrating it into the base OS. Had they seriously provided a Unix application environment years eariler, they would have cut off a big chunk of Linux growth.
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
Either Ballmer, Allchin, and Gates give up control of the company, or Microsoft will be irrelevant (if not bankrupt) by 2012-2015.
Something I've said many times before, and will maintain, is that Microsoft have never had a concrete, long term operating system strategy after Windows NT 4. That is evident from the fact that 2000 and XP were both merely incremental upgrades to NT 4 for the most part.
Vista is going to be comprised of leftovers...Things which Microsoft would have incorporated years ago if it hadn't been for them having to make ship dates. It is also going to be Microsoft's last release that the majority of the computer-using public care about.
Microsoft need to do what Apple have done; move to a BSD core, and thus allow each group to play to its' own strengths. The BSD people are very good at making a core, underlying operating system. Microsoft on the other hand have proven that they're good at UI and glitz. If the two were to be combined, we'd have a system unlike anything we've yet seen...the best of both worlds. This is where the GNU crowd need to see that the BSD license is useful in the grand scheme of things...because it gives companies who want a closed-source product a competently-constructed base.
However, I know that realistically, Microsoft are not going to do this. Gates, Ballmer, and Allchin are going to stay in control, and the company is going to become irrelevant, because they won't let go of their usual, failed way of doing things.
Disney used to consistently be on the list of top 100 companies to work for. The corporate atmosphere changed, not the people. If you mean "change" being a switch from focusing on the needs and interests of their employees and customers to "shareholder value", then yes, you're quite right. People don't like that kind of change, except for the shareholders of course.
Same thing happened at EDS, which used to be a really great company to work for. The focus shifted from quality service to executing contracts as cheaply as possible. Morale tanked, service went to hell, contracts impoded, downward spiral began.
Dell is currently experiencing the beginning of its slide. One of the first signs is a shift away from quality customer service. That's how it begins.
The only thing surprising about the MSFT internal distress is how long it took for people outside the company to find out.
If you want to test my theory, then watch SAIC. Currently an employee owned company, but they're about to go public. My bet is their IPO will lead to a period of rapid growth, eventually shifting to a focus on making money for the stakeholders. Service will suffer, the employees that have been there the longest (and hence make the most) will get forced out so they can be replaced with lower cost replacements. Turn over will increase, service will suffer, contracts will be lost. SAIC will turn into EDS.
I think it's funny how bean counters see the old guys as a liability to be replaced. Forgetting that the reason they have been with the company so long and make the most money is that the customer likes them and they get the job done.
When bean counters get ahold of your business, the same thing is going to happen as when Republicans get ahold of your country.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
After re-reading what I wrote in the parent comment, I realize that it is excessively pro-Microsoft, in my opinion.
There are entire huge areas of abuse that I didn't mention.
Several years ago I accompanied some friends to a computer store to help them buy a computer. We were offered Microsoft Office for $50. That's why Lotus SmartSuite and Corel WordPerfect lost market share. There was always a two-tier market for Microsoft Office. You could pay full price, or you could pay $50. It seemed to me that Microsoft was less than intense about stopping the pirates, because that ran the competitors out of business.
Microsoft did the same thing with DOS. At one time, 5 local and national distributors with which I did business all carried pirated DOS. I visited one distributor that indicated they were genuinely concerned, and showed them that it was easy to detect a pirated copy. Microsoft verified that. Other DOS-like operating systems were not able to compete with broad-scale piracy.
In 2002, Microsoft implemented a plan it called "Software Assurance". At the time, Ed Foster, who writes a famous column called GripeLine, called Software Assurance "manipulation
In his column released on September 15, 2005, Ed quoted one customer as saying that Software Assurance was "one of the biggest sucker jobs of all time".
Ed said, "The thing that Software Assurance has always assured is Microsoft revenue -- what the customer has gotten is risk, and lots of it. Expecting Microsoft to deliver value when they've already got your money is just not a very good bet."
Those are just two short examples. Some people believe that there are hundreds of Microsoft abuses like that, but, as far as I know, no one has counted all of them.