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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.
Sheyah. They all say that until the chairs start flying.
Many Bothans died to bring you this sig.
Until I read the "Microsoft's not evil" part. This must be a hoax.
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
Out of Office Reply: I'm not currently in my office, which is being rennovated to accomodate a swimming pool and a helipad, but am instead on a business trip to Hawaii, for a training course in pearl diving. Once I return to Redmond, I'll be happy to get in touch with you, after sampling the fine quailty pizza left over from the last meeting about Vista. Take care!
GetOuttaMySpace - The Anti-Social Network
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
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
I'm glad you asked. I am not always "sure" (the perpetual "the grass is always greener _somewhere else_" problem), but I think I am happy where I am and this is a good fit.
.NET and Winforms now ;). I only view coding as a means to solve a problem.
Before you stop reading - something to be aware of is that MS has a position called "SDE/T" - Software Design Engineer in Test. They've been phasing out the traditional "STE" (software test engineer) role. I've been an SDE/T since my hire date.
I originally interviewed for an SDE role with a couple teams, one of them being NT, and those didn't go well. It was the beginning of the reality check for me about what I knew and what I didn't. There were coding problems they asked me to solve in SDE interviews that I didn't solve acceptably. The recruiter would ask a quesiton like "rate your understanding of C++ on a scale of 1 to 10". Me being the hotshot college jerkoff I was said "9". Then she was like "ok, what do you need to do to become a 10?". Then I thought about it a bit and said something like "write a C++ compiler, hang out in comp.lang.*, etc". Then she asked "so why haven't you done that?"
Oh.
In these developer interviews, they were asking very hardcore questions about programming, sometimes for programming's sake. I don't code for coding's sake. I started coding back in 5th grade on an apple ][. I cut my teeth with turbo pascal and TASM. I graduated to C in 9th grade (via summer camps and stuff). I had plenty of exposure to programming, a good bit of exposure to languages, etc. But i still can't tell you what all of the bitwise operators do in C without looking at a manual. I can't tell you _anything_ about MFC (except that I am glad we have
I don't write code for the sake of coding, and I don't like memorizing the details of uninteresting things (even though I like trivia).
So, when you're interviewing with someone that writes a C optimizer for a living, how can you say that you're a solid "10" at C programming. Compared to who? them? Not unless you've also written a commercially shipping C compiler. When you're talking to the guys that shuffle bits in binary headers in the guts of the kernel, how can you say with a straight face that you get shift-right and shift-left confused because you never use them ? That was me.
That was the perspective I never got until i started at MS. I was used to being at the top of my classes in school and I rarely ran across someone that had the same problem solving skills I had. That's what I came to my MS interviews with.
For an SDE position, they're after someone that is passionte about coding. Someone that lives and breathes it. They want to write code when they're not at work. That's not me. I do some coding at home, but only when there's some especially irksome problem at hand that nobody has a good solution to, and that I think i can pull off. When I'm not at work, I'm more inclined to want to work on my car. The car could be better, and I can't afford to pay a garage to work on it, so I've learned to do it myself. I'll never get ASE certified, but I'll learn how to do what I need to do to a car to accomplish my goals. Nothing more.
The position I have actually has a fair bit of design and coding. But it's not shipping code - it's code that tests or optimizes the testing of the actual shipping product. Automated testing is the name of the game at Microsoft. I was the guy behind the the automated testing system that ran all of the developer tools tests for a couple years. There's a lot of moving parts in that system. It worked in spite of itself (it was all written in VB, ran against a single SQL box, but served thousands of 24/7 automation execution machines.. with hundreds of thousands of automated tests). I knew the code to that thing well.. but not because I liked the code (i didn't), but because I liked what it did. I liked the power it gave our test org, and the quality we could drive into
My opinions are my own, and do not necessarily represent those of my employer.
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.