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Working at Microsoft, the Inside Scoop
bariswheel writes "Responding to the public interest, a long-time Apple and UNIX user/programmer, and a JPL/Caltech veteran, writes an insightful, articulate essay on the good, the bad, and the in-between experiences of working at Microsoft; concentrating on focus, unreality, company leadership, managers, source code, benefits and compensation, free soft drinks, work/life balance, Microsoft's not evil, and influence."
Aside from the obvious puff-piece nature of this article, it's a bit of a Trojan Horse. Under the auspices of a broad view of what life at Microsoft is like, the author gets to air out the PR spin that Microsoft's Not Evil in seven contrite paragraphs (the average number of paragraphs for each segment is closer to four).
Also, assign credibility inversely proportional to the distance from the source. This guy works there, okay so the only way to describe "work at Microsoft" is to be there, but come on, are we going to get objective information?
For the record, I once worked at Microsoft, and agree with his observations that the people there are like people elsewhere, and they're bright, and they're hard-working, etc. But, to equate individual ethical behavior somehow with a collective corporate ethos doesn't add up, the calculus is flawed. In my opinion, Microsoft as a corporation exhibits behavior that could be considered evil, certainly some/much of its behavior has been found in a court of law to be illegal.
As for the some of the author's observations:
Yes.
Thou doth protest too much.
Microsoft's ill-gotten gains were long the easy way to sustain the talent pipe-line. Market forces are catching up, and Microsoft is starting to have to compete on more equal footing with other companies to get talent in the door (no more, "you're guaranteed to be a millionaire in fiver years" promises). And, it's a little annoying to hear the Microsoft have-nots whine about this -- join the rest of the world folks.
What do you call a convicted criminal (monopolist, in this case)? A reborn and reformed model for society?
... 1000 times better than working at most jobs these days. And, if it really sucks at least you can put it on your resume for a better location and position at your next job.
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
It's called "selling out". Everyone has their price. The trick is to recognize it and work within it.
He came back spouting the virtues of MSFT because he basically sold his values and convictions [the good kind] for a paycheque and status.
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
"Did I mention I've had six or seven managers in five years? Two were so awful that if they were hired into my current organization (even on another team), I'd quit on the spot."
One has to wonder why he didn't "quit on the spot" previously... say, about the time the second was assigned to supervise him.
In thirty years, working in mid-sized nonprofit, one Fortune 500 company, one ten-person startup, and two mid-sized for-profits, I've only had no managers "so awful that if they were hired into my current organization (even on another team) I'd quite on the spot." I've only had one so awful that if they were hired to supervise me, I'd quit... and when he was, I did. (Honesty compels me to say that it took me a year before I did... but I did).
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
I have to admit that even though I could feel the slant of this article I could not help but feel a little bit excited by this. Knowing Microsoft technologies is what pays the bills for me (C#) but I have tried to avoid becoming a fanboy for all things Microsoft. However, after reading this article, I cannot help but think that Microsoft is a pretty cool place to work. The .NET Framework is a massively impressive codebase that I would be psyched to work on. Not to mention that the environment is painted as more Google-esque than I previously realized. How many of us (who have all bashed Microsoft fairly and unfairly) would not drop our current job to take a position at Microsoft? I know that I would.
- Andrew
I meta-moderate because I care.
Until he said this: "No one ever says "Hey, let's go ruin company P" or other things that could be construed as "evil.""
He must have missed the news about Steve B, chairs and Google.
Working AT Microsoft is probably quite nice.
Working WITH Microsoft (products) isn't.
And having to work AROUND Microsoft (bugs) most certainly isn't!
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
A really interesting article, but his take on the whole "Microsoft is not evil" thing by looking at what it's like to be employed there reminds me of the Hank Scorpio episode of The Simpsons. Do you mind helping out with those enemy soldiers on your way out? They're trying to destroy the doomsday weapon we've been working so hard to finish.
Sure it's a fine place to work and the folks are all just family people trying to solve customers' problems... It's just that their customers are IT Managers who want to lock down Windows so that bonehead users can't email javascript files to each other (even as attachments) but apparently have no problem with embedded vbscript in email.
Compare the assertion ``all of the division heads (and their staff, and their staff) are top-notch'' with the observation ``In contrast, most of the middle management should be tossed.''
It seems to me that a large responsibility of upper level management is to hire, train and retain middle-management. If the high level folks can't make good decisions on promoting rank and file to management or in attracting quality management from outside, how can they be trusted to not run the company into the ground?
A big portion of the dilemma you describe, ignoring the silly 31337 *nix fanboys, is that the inner workings of open systems in the eyes of the systems engineer is readily available. A BSD or Linux admin can rip right down to the source of a particular system call and know what's going on. Even if the stuff is partially documented, any flaws in the doc can be made pretty apparent by looking at the source.
As someone who's worked in a mixed environment (Linux/OpenVMS/Win32) I've been pretty satisfied with the operation of certain aspects of Microsoft products. However, when a major problem comes up, and Microsoft doesn't happen to have it documented in TechNet you're hosed and are stuck ponying up for support.
Sure there are MSDN forum archives that can give you a bit of insight, but that requires a subscription and for the average business they're not going to pony up for that. Building unattended windows installations are pretty much by the seat of the pants, and require third party utilities to be managable.
Active Directory (pre-2003) was a real hassle to diagnose, and often required a ~$150 call to Microsoft if you made a simple typo. Not to mention Microsoft's history of acknowledgement and fixing of third party diagnosed security issues in their software is abysmal as opposed to F/OSS environments where a patch for a security issue is often included in the advisory release.
Bug tracking is done behind closed doors as opposed to F/OSS where bugs released to the developers are readily available, if they are not immediately patchable work arounds can be inferred by System Administrators themselves. "Early" releases of hotfixes can be paid for, but by then who knows how long the bug has been known.
I'm not knocking the security advances M$ has begun to add on to it's platforms. But it's definition of secure-by-default has a long way to go to provide comparable security to secure-by-design operating systems.
Everybody has access to open source code, that is somewhat given away in it's name. I think if you would've read the complete article you would've understood that he meant the M$ codebase is open for all employees to see/learn/fix. IANAC (I am no a coder) so I wouldn't know much about whether that'd be a good idea, but taking into account the number of employees M$ has, the source seems to be reviewed by quite a few people. That has always been one of the selling points of open source software afaik.
And if M$ would've open sourced IE 6 years ago, that could've prevented that whole Active-X fiasco. But they didn't, and now Opera/FireFox are building more marketshare, why is that a bad thing?
I don't mean to dis this guy, but this award list should not be used as a demonstration of impressiveness. It's very typical of a person in his situation. He's doing fine, but there are PLENTY of /. readers doing just as well, thanks. Of course there are also 13 year olds but...
While at NASA he got a grant -- from NASA. Internal grants of institutions like this are generally easier to come by than external ones (trust me, I have many), and more importantly, they're usually the result of a large number of people working on a proposal. Likewise, he has four patents listed, all variants of the same item: almost unquestionably this is joint work he's done with as a team member while at Microsoft. This is all good stuff to have on your resume, but it's not atypical.
Companies (countries, races, etc.) are not "evil" or "good", and they do not have "intentions." Star Trek is science fiction -- there is no Borg mind.
I actually entirely disagree here. Corporations, especially large ones, tend to suffer from what I call "hive mind" or "borg mind." In reality, both metaphores are surprisingly apt.
The complex "hive mind" behaviors in bees, ants, and similar insects occurs because the insects communicate with eachother via scents and/or body language. Thus behavior spreads from insect to insect until you see what looks like a more elaborate mind when it is really the result of a system of minimally programmed units which communicate with eachother. The concept of the borg mind in Star Trek is not that far removed as it is based on the complex information exchange between the different units.
In any sufficiently large organization, you get structures which provide a great degree of organizational inertia. In other words, at some point it doesn't even matter what Steve Ballmer really thinks, the actual organization can only continue to evolve in its own niche. Other management interests, stockholder interests, and so forth, will see to that. This brings me to my next point: Corporations, though they seem to personify non-conscious forces seem to personify the sort of collective mind that we see in the insect world. Except that we communicate via sound vibrations, pushing buttons on a keyboard, or making marks on paper.
The final point is that for anyone who has ever worked in a corporate environment (I used to work for Microsoft), it is very easy for the workers to begin to believe the propaganda of the company. This tendency actually increases as one goes up the management chain because often company loyalty (and gullibility) are rewarded with promotions at least as far as middle management, and for upper level management, they are sufficiently isolated from what goes on at the ground level that they don't have sufficient feedback. So the corporate mind is self-sustaining, viral, and can take over your thought processes. One ends up with a corporate cult, and Microsoft is no exception (but is rather the rule).
I prefer working on my own in a small consulting business. Sooner or later we will need a management infrastructure, but when this occurs, I intend to take a close look at how these problems can be solved.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
How is it crippled ?
You have never seen VMS in action, have you?
The ability to have a cluster with *decades* of uptime is something that NT is not even close to technically. Most of the features that made VMS great for certain types of applications, such as the clustering features, are not nearly as well developed in NT.
The tight integration that was possible between VMS systems is similarly not really possible in NT. So yes, for building anything more than small departmental servers, NT is crippled.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
If anything, Microsoft seems to have the opposite problem, in which employees sometimes design or cut a feature or product without fully appreciating the huge impact their decision can have outside the company.
Among the different forms of evil, that is actually a major one: if you have a lot of power and impact, it is your duty to think about the consequences of your actions carefully, otherwise you indeed are evil.
The reality is that Microsoft is made up of mostly honest, earnest, hardworking people. People with families. People with hardships. People with ordinary and extraordinary lives.
Yes, but the reality is that Microsoft's competitors are made up of mostly honest, earnest, and hardworking people as well. The problem is that Microsoft's senior management has adopted policies and strategies in the past that unfairly deprive the mostly honest, earnest, and hardworking people in those other companies of the just rewards of their hard work.
No one ever says "Hey, let's go ruin company P"
Actually, some people are on record saying that. People like Ballmer, for example. And that's what people refer to when they say "Microsoft is evil", namely that the people in charge have behaved unethically (not to mention illegally).
But there's one thing people do that really drives me nuts: anthropomorphization.
It drives me nuts, too--in particular, it drives me nuts that corporations have managed to get the rights of real persons in areas like free speech. However, given that they have, it seems only fair that at least we anthropomorphize them when we talk about them.
Overall, I think there are lots of good, well-meaning people working at Microsoft. But as long as there are on-going legal problems over monopolistic practices and as long as people like Ballmer are in charge, there continues to be reason to apply the label "evil" to the company as an entity, no matter what fraction of the employees are not evil.