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Microsoft's Treatment of Google Defectors
Miguel de Icaza (Note, this Miguel is not the Ximian developer, just someone whose small life is fulfilled by trolling under someone else's name) writes "Here is a story revealing just how threatened Microsoft is by Google. While senior partners can expect the full chair experience, some lowly staffers who are putting in their notice are being escorted off campus immediately. Why? Because they've put in their notice to join Google. In Microsoft's eyes, Google is Enemy No. 1. Anyone leaving Redmond for the search leader is a threat. Not because they'll scurry around collecting company secrets — as if Google's interested in Microsoft's '90s-era technologies. Departing employees, however, might tell other 'Softies how much better Google is. If an employee is leaving for Amazon.com or another second-tier employer which doesn't make Microsoft so paranoid, they'll probably serve out the traditional two weeks of unproductive wrapping up. So if you're planning on leaving Microsoft for Google, pack up your belongings and say goodbye to friends ahead of time. There'll be no cake and two weeks of paid slacking for you."
I have never worked for Microsoft and to be honest, I'd probably never want to. I think the key problem for Microsoft is that nothing they do is exciting anymore.
I think Vista has really damaged Microsoft. Not in terms of revenue, since a sale of Windows XP is still a sale for Microsoft. No, the damage is in morale. Vista was an absolute disaster for morale. They worked for a couple of years only to ditch it and start again from the Windows 2003 Server source-code. Nothing they put in to Vista was in anyway something you can get developers energised about. Every feature had nightmarish committees which destroyed any hope of motivation. They even developed anti-features like SecurePath that nobody cares about.
I read somewhere that Microsoft developers write something like 1,000 lines of code a year. Last-year, I contributed around forty times that to our source control at work. When you're paid so much to do so little - that has to destroy morale too. Most developers I know like to work.
Vista is a symptom of a much deeper problem. Microsoft doesn't know how to be sexy. it doesn't now how to to be secure and it doesn't know how to please it's users. Worst of all, it doesn't know how to make it's huge base of developers happy!
All of this makes Google a very attractive place. If all your talent walks right of your door, it isn't too long until there is no way whatsoever to fix any of the problems I've just mentioned.
Put more succinctly, Microsoft sucks and Google rocks.
Simon.
Actually, getting escorted out the door gets you two weeks of paid slacking at home! I would consider it an insult if I weren't important enough to be shown the door in a paranoid fury.
Its not SOP. I've been through many companies, not a single one treated me or other employees this way. If someone wants to damage the company, why would they give you a chance to throw you out? They'll just do it before they put in their notice. Respect your employees and they'll treat you in kind.
But the story is that MS is not doing this for security, they're doing it to prevent 'defectors' taking others with them. I really can't even begin to get inside the thought process of whoever had this idea - who seriously thinks "Hmm, good employees are leaving because they think another company is a more pleasant place to work, we'd better make sure the secret doesn't get out" rather than "Hmm, good employees are leaving because they think another company is a more pleasant place to work, we'd better see if we can find out what we're doing wrong and perhaps work on fixing it".
So Microsoft is now treating employees the same way they treat customers?
Said like a lousy manager, or one who doesn't appreciate what people actually do, or somebody who never worked in a large enough organization to appreciate the true cost of attrition, or I don't know what...
Excepting the departures of Truly Useless People, those last two weeks are somebody's last chance to find out that which you don't know about that which you are about to inherit. I am so sick of watching stupid managers and stupid successors squander that invaluable last chance because they act like scorned girlfriends or just don't understand the true value of even people who would leave, and the undocumented knowledge they carry in their heads.
I've never met a leaving person who wouldn't be helpful in his own succession. Most, in fact, are incredulous as to how little anybody seems to care about the invaluable knowledge they are walking away with, and how much more difficult their successor's lives will be for the ignorance.
Shape up, managers and everybody else. Those defectors leaving your ranks should be more valuable to you in those last two weeks than in any other two weeks of their employ.
By escorting someone out, it could be an intentional signal to the other employees that you take this rivalry seriously. Or by letting them work the two weeks, it could be a signal that you are employee-friendly and there are no hard feelings. But the main concern really needs to be about how the remaining employees feel. There should be little concern about how the departing employee feels - except that it's often not a good idea to make enemies.