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Competing to Work for Microsoft
theodp writes "Addressing 5,000 developers in Bangalore, Bill Gates announced the Code4Bill contest, a nationwide talent hunt which will begin in January and last eight months. Twenty finalists will receive internships with Microsoft India before one Superhero is selected to join Mr. Gates's own team."
I am a software engineer in Bangalore, and honestly I find this "contest" a bit condescending. I mean, why should I jump through hoops to work at Microsft? If I wanted to work at a large company, I can apply to Oracle, Sun, IBM, Yahoo or Google (all of whom have development centres in Bangalore).
The only situation where I can imagine myself competing against 5000 developers for a single job would be if I was fanatical about the organisation (e.g., Google), and I certainly don't feel that way about MS.
Give me that guy's code, and I'll find at least a dozen things in it that are pretty much fireable offenses in any reasonably disciplined dev org. During my time at Microsoft (5+ years), I've known no less than 50 Indian SDEs (MSFT jargon for software developer). Only two of them could write what I'd call "good code". One of these two was a freakin' genius, but I digress. I don't know if it's cultural or not, but it seems that Indians are predisposed to writing horribly convoluted, unmaintainable cut&paste garbage (sorry, I can't call _this_ "code"). For most of them, if it works _somehow_ means it's good enough. If it were up to me, half of these folks (not just Indian, of course) would be gone and the rest would be scared of checking in atrocities they check in right now for others to rewrite later.
And the thing is, the culture at MSFT is such that you can't just email into dev team alias and say "this is crap, and this needs to be rewritten". You'd "hurt people's feelings", which will affect your yearly review, pushing it towards (or below) 3.5 grade, for which you get bonus and stock grant that may or may not cover the cost of living. So folks just shut up and suffer.
Actually, I think Vista will be pretty interesting to watch. It is now mandatory in many (if not all) teams at MSFT to outsource at least something across all disciplines. They outsource mostly Test, but since you have to outsource Dev and PM, too, some of Dev and PM work gets done in IDC (India Development Center). Generally, whatever comes from there ends up being rewritten by non-Indian devs in Redmond, on their own time, because you aren't going to tell your (most likely Indian) manager that the code that came from IDC fucking sucks. As pressure goes up in the ship cycle, folks in Redmond have less and less time to rewrite IDC garbage, so it gets checked in (and shipped) as-is. So I fully expect Vista to be a fuckup of gigantic proportions, until at least SP1.
The sad part is, people will buy it anyway.
BTW, this is not a racist or anti-outsourcing rant. Test folks in China did (and no doubt still do) a stellar job. I'm just puzzled that Indians fuck up so badly time after time. If you guys are reading this, you've got to realize that sooner or later it will become clear to the higher ups that company money is better spent in China, despite pretty shitty English that Chinese folks speak.