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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."
Ah - a feel-good story about someone who has had a good experience working there and hasn't seen any nefarious activities during his or her time there.
Of what value is it to place any confidence in such accounts? It is quite possible to have worked for the mob, be well treated, and not see any nefarious activity. It is not only possible but likely (and therefore infinitely reasonable) that such activities will be concealed from such an observer. If the activities of the organization in question are well documented and proven beyond a reasonable doubt to -in fact- be evil, then such "insider" accounts to the contrary have absolutely no relevance.
My friends and I knew a guy at our college (Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology) that was hired on at Microsoft. Prior to leaving, he was always very open-minded about software usage, willing to try various options, be they proprietary or open source. After a while, he came back a changed man. He simply couldn't fathom how it was that we (as students) were using anything but Microsoft products, and would argument, sometimes vehemently, that we shouldn't be using *NIX or anything of that nature. It was truly scary.
"You will pay for your lack of vision..." - Emperor Palpatine to Ray Charles
I was going to comment that I thought it was interesting that this guy was mentioned as being from a mixed UNIX, Apple, Caltech, and JPL background. I thought about why that might be relevant.
In any case, this guy is just one data point in trying to get a picture of "life on the inside" of Microsoft. You might find other pictures by reading my (and other MSFTies here - there are many) slashdot posts on the subject, or by reading the minimsft blog, or by trying to decipher the publicly-made statements by our PR people (or by PR agencies working on our behalf). All will paint slightly different pictures.
Unfortuneately i haven't been able to read the article - thanks slashdot effect - but I'm always curious to see MSFT people talking about "life on the inside", to see how their experiences compare to my own.
As far as my own background - as recently as college, i was saying things like "I will never work for a company that expects me to use NT - it's shit", as I coded away infront of my work provided SGI Indy. I gave up Windows after 3.1 and used OS/2, linux, and Solaris at home until college, when I switched to exclusively solaris and irix.
When I joined MS about 6 years ago i was still very anti-MS. I was joining to light a fire under the people that had burdened the world with so many bad things. I figured that peoeple just didn't have the unix expertise and outside world view that i brought to the table. If they only knew, I thought.
I probably made a lot of enemies those first few years, especially people on the outlook and exchange teams. But I also got a few private emails from product support guys saying "i loved reading that.. thank you for flaming person blah...our customers run into this all the time.. somebody should have said this sooner"
I was fond of pointing out that i used Pine against exchange-IMAP because at least Pine knew how to not block its UI threads while trying to access a message. (This is fixed in Outlook XP, Outlook 2003, and works pretty well in Outlook 12 betas, btw)
For a while, it seemed, my strategy of badgering MSFT people about how great *nix was and how much MS sucked was working. I was involved in some of the "how do we compete with {linux,solaris,apache} conversations even though I was some lowly tester off in Visual Studio. I was obnoxious, antagonistic, and I claimed big street cred working in the unix side of the industry. We were struggling at first to get dedicated, experienced people in place to understand the unix-competitive landscape, so much so that it made sense for "them" to talk to a bozo like me about it. Things are better now - there are smart people that work on understanding the *nix landscape full time.
The culture change I've observed here has been pretty satisfying. When I first complained that VB6 didn't work for debugging DLLs if you didn't have admin rights, a PM for VB told me "the NT security model is too hard, we're not going to bother figuring it out". That kind of crap doesn't fly _at all_ any more. We've really "got religion" around non-admin, secure-by-default, etc. That stuff keeps getting better and we're chipping away at the debt of design and code deficienies we have in the face of an always-on, hostile internet that nobody expected years and years ago [historians will note that the _first_ internet worm worked on unix machines.. and unix collectively has had a spotty and evolving approach to practical security.. ]
Naturally, MSFT has changed me as well. I used to come into discussions with the "UNIX roolz, MS suxx0rz" point of view. I was interviewing with a guy in NT and he was trying to ask me technical questions and I was trying to tell him how the NT design sucked because i read it in BYTE magazine. (i flunked that interview)
I've since learned that, actually, when I used to make those sorts of generalizations, I actually didn't know enough about anything to be running my big mouth. I was having an argument with some guy where I was talking about how the S
My opinions are my own, and do not necessarily represent those of my employer.
I was a contractor at Microsoft from 1995-1997, working on MSN.com when it first came out, before Internet Explorer existed. As a result, I was apart of the permatemp class action lawsuit.
My Microsoft experience was both good and bad.
I got to work with some really talented and highly skilled people and learned a ton. The original lead engineer on Slate.com was a great guy and mentored me on his own, even though I wasn't a "blue badge" and not entitled to such perks. He had been recruited out of college back in the late 80s so he was a millionaire. He retired a few years later after his second marriage/wedding since he had already lost his first marriage to Microsoft and didn't wish to repeat the experience. He also told me that only people hired on at or promoted to a certain level got really lucrative stock options. From what I saw, he was right.
I shared an office at one point with an amazing programmer, super smart and super nice guy. I remember him telling me that he had to learn to not care so much about his work because the business and marketing departments always rule in the end. He had a product he had worked on that he was really proud of, the users were really happy and he was excited about working on more features. He never got to because the product was outsourced and no more versions were going to be released, it was just to be supported as is and it didn't matter if the support was mediocre, just that it was cheaper. He said he found that a hard pill to swallow because he really believed in producing great products but he learned to accept it and was "watching the clock" meaning waiting his 5 years for his stock to vest. I met several fulltimers watching the clock and they seemed to me to be the some of the most talented people there.
I met many people who worked very hard and others who were coasting, some arrogant and rude with no social skills whatsoever and some genuine, amicable and highly skilled, both fulltimers and contractors.
I worked with great managers and incompetent ones. One manager was so bad that when the first round of contractor layoffs happened at one point, he cut a really skilled programmer who was vital to many projects in favor of keeping around the pretty, no experience or technical ability, woman that he was boinking, much to the dismay of the rest of us who had to workaround the incompetence of both of them. He was arrogant and had a mullet, a paradox beyond comprehension.
I did not envy the people who became fulltimers during this time. Compared to contractor pay which included overtime, their pay was cut in half and their hours stayed the same or increased. One friend had to move somewhere cheaper due to the pay cut and carried 3 pagers at all times resulting in her moving closer to work as well. Her first year of employment was what was then called the "probation year" meaning she would not receive any stock options until after that first year. She and other people who went fulltime soon realized that the stock options were not going to make them millionaires but simply restore the compensation that had been cut when they took the salaried fulltime job. I knew several talented people who left before their options vested as a result.
Some contractors-to-fulltimers I knew did ok with stock options meaning they were able to gain an extra 200-250k and after taxes bought themselves a nice house and/or car. But no one retired early.
I knew several fulltimers who once they hit their 5 year mark, cashed out their stock and left the Microsoft with propriertary information on which they based a new company, hoping to get bought out by Microsoft and make more money. Some were sued, some weren't sued but didn't get bought out as they hoped, some did.
Overall, it was an interesting place to be during the time I was there. That said, I'm inclined to think that the author's experience is not the norm given the high status at which he entered the company. If he had come in as an entry level contractor or programmer, his experience would be much different.
- tokengeekgrrl
I don't think that Microsoft has their talent spread too thin. The real issue is not to my mind the lack of focus in product improvements but the lack of technical maturity of the systems as a whole. I would point out that in 2000, Microsoft finally came around to technology that had been in use for nearly seventeen years (Kerberos). In short the real problem is their approach to the market, not spreading themselves too thin, etc.
;-)
Win9x for example, was a real improvement over Win3.x because it added some real technical advantages, but it was sort of a hybrid or shim approach to technical problems that ideally could have been handled better if DOS was designed better from the start (anyone remember what QDOS really stood for?).
Microsoft is the proto-Wal-mart of the software world (you know, the seller of cheap plastic junk). The approach has generally been that it doesn't have to be better, just cheaper and more appealing to the lowest common denominator. This price advantage of Microsoft has been probably on the whole beneficial to the industry in that it has made computing more ubiquitous and therefore has helped the development of the internet and even open source as a global phenominon. However, Microsoft software tends to be poorly thought out and poorly implemented.
The NT architecture is, after all, a severely crippled reimplementation of VMS with a nice GUI running on it and some Windows emulation
The rush to market and the unwillingness to spend the time necessary to get things right has meant a great deal of trouble for users of Microsoft software. Indeed even when Microsoft attempted to reimplement UNIX (their Xenix product that they later sold to SCO), it was worst in class.
In essence, Microsoft is largely a marketing company that sells cheap, poorly implemented software. Bad systems trump bad people, so the problem is not a lack of talent so much as a system in place that prevents people from making good software.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
Definition of evil:
1. Morally bad or wrong; wicked: an evil tyrant.
(you admit that MS can be labeled immoral. Hence, the 'evil' tag fits.)
2. Causing ruin, injury, or pain; harmful: the evil effects of a poor diet.
(it has been demonstrated in courts of law that MS has causes ruin to its
competitors. Hence, the 'evil' tag fits here as well.)
3. Characterized by or indicating future misfortune; ominous: evil omens.
(Reports of Vista's flaws would certainly seem to fit this definition.)
4. Bad or blameworthy by report; infamous: an evil reputation.
(No reasonably sane person with the ability to read English can deny that MS
has a terrible reputation.)
5. Characterized by anger or spite; malicious: an evil temper.
(Such as certain individuals throwing chairs at walls and shouting
profanities? Granted, these individuals are not the entirety of MS... but
they *are* representative of the leadership of the company.)
Based on the above defintions, I'd have to give Microsoft a 4.5 out of 5 for "evil".
G.B.Y.L.B.T., PastorEd