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Some Developers Leaving Google For Microsoft
recoiledsnake writes "We have heard about lots of talented developers jumping ship from Microsoft to Google, but is the trend beginning to turn? Dare Obasanjo (a Microsoft employee) writes about a few high-profile people picking Microsoft over Google — either making the jump directly, or choosing Microsoft after receiving offers at both. Sergey Solyanik is back to Microsoft and he primarily gripes about the culture and lack of career development at Google. He writes, 'Everything is pretty much run by [engineering] — PMs and testers are conspicuously absent from the process. Google as an organization is not geared — culturally — to delivering enterprise class reliability to its user applications.' Danny Thorpe, who was the key architect of Google Gears, is back at Microsoft for his second stint working on developer technologies related to Windows Live."
No, I didn't RTFA, but I'd guess the quality of life in Seattle is about, oh, one billion times better than the Bay Area.
Observers report large numbers of chairs flying out the windows of Google headquarters. More at 11.
Pagers and web-based software is so 2002!
"Everything is pretty much run by [engineering] -- PMs and testers are conspicuously absent from the process."
Oh what a fucking nightmare!
How we know is more important than what we know.
"Google as an organization is not geared - culturally - to delivering enterprise class reliability to its user applications."
Whew, good thing Microsoft is.
"Google as an organization is not geared -- culturally -- to delivering enterprise class reliability to its user applications."
You don't have to be, when the entire on-line world is your beta test laboratory.
Sig this!
When I hear "...is not geared - culturally - to delivering enterprise class reliability to its user applications" as a reason to leave a company that's NOT microsoft to go work FOR microsoft, I have to wonder exactly how large the dump truck full of money was.
stuff |
Perhaps a bit of this is the desire to stand out for their good works. Google has been on such a roll latley I would imagine that even if you came up with the sweet new feature or revolutionary new web app, that if might get piled into the heap of great new features and great new apps. At Microsoft however these days the public perception seems to be (amounst those that I know) that they do little right and are genrally a top heavy monolith. Could not the "wiz kid" with a few freash ideas garner much more attention in such an envirnoment. And perhaps in doing so come more to the attention of the offer makers at google? 1: put in a couple years at microsoft 2: become a "star" 3: get even better offer than what you would make by working your way up through the crowd at google. 4: Profit... sorry I'm new if I messed that up.
I Need someone to rebuild a Digitech Digital Delay pedal for me....for me...for me...for me.
Microsoft has more testers.
Therefore, Microsoft's products are better than Google's.
*bzzt* - ERROR - OVERLOAD - ERROR *bzzt*
"Google as an organization is not geared -- culturally -- to delivering enterprise class reliability to its user applications." - Sergey Solyanik
As opposed to Microsoft, which seems to be not geared - professionally - to delivering enterprise class reliability to its user applications.
but they better STFU while the engineers are talking.
--
Stay tuned for some shock and awe coming right up after this messages!
Now you're just shooting fish in a barrel. That was too easy.
my insights may be modded Funny, but at least some of my jokes are modded Insightful
Everything is pretty much run by [engineering] -- PMs and testers are conspicuously absent from the process. Google as an organization is not geared -- culturally -- to delivering enterprise class reliability to its user applications. At Microsoft, everything is pretty much run by Marketing. Anybody who uses the marketing-speak phrase "delivering enterprise class reliability to its user applications" obviously has more of a marketing mindset than an Engineering mindset, and thus would be better off at Microsoft. If we are indeed seeing a migration of hard-core engineers from Microsoft to Google and of Marketing droids from Google to Microsoft, well than, I'd say the movement in both directions benefits Google! (I've seen many extremely talented software engineers go to work for Microsoft over the years, so if their software sucks, it's certainly not for lack of creative talent.)
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
but most of them primarily help people waste time online (blogger, youtube, orkut, etc)
No, these are things to sell eyeballs for advertisers. That's what Google is about, making money with selling ads around easy to use and "fun" tools.
bash$
I love how there is an article that has first hand accounts of why actual people are leaving Google to work at Microsoft and there still seems to be argument against Microsoft. The Rush Limbaugh's of the tech world. We always get emails on our team about people that used to work at Microsoft then go to another (Valve, google, etc..) and then come back after a couple of months of or a year complaining how the other engineering systems just suck. Microsoft does deliver world class products if you are willing to look past non SP1 Vista.
I'd have figured that they were just leaving Google so they'd actually have something interesting to do. At Microsoft, there's still loads of core functionality missing from their software.
The myriad possibilities for improvement simply boggle the mind.
I havn't RTFA's in a long time here, but wow, that second article is such a reminder in !RTFA = less desire to punch monitor. Wtf seriously, guy seems to be motivated only if people are buying the product as a measure of usefulness?? I dunno, maybe having 20 million people using some software you built might also be an indication of that? ;)
A few are needed, but the fewer marketing droids masquerading as engineering-types, the better.
Hopefully some of the google brass will have the humor to upload a video of themselves throwing a chair on youtube^Hgoogle video.
GAAH! MY PRINTER IS ON FIRE!!! PUT IT OUT! PUT IT OUT!
"Sorry open source fanatics, your world is not for me!" What the fuck does open source have to do with his move from Google to Microsoft?
"Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
Google as an organization is not geared -- culturally -- to delivering enterprise class reliability to its user applications
Can't be more right than that. That darn search engine wasn't up one time I tried to use it. Like seven years ago.
Not like MSN Messenger, or Hotmail. Never have any problems with those. Right.
this is fat bullshit. i have two colleagues that work at Google in Ireland. people are pretty much motivated for innovation and new services. all this "bugs" story is a little bit true because each browser with updates (especially IE auto patches) are fucking whole compatibility stuff (especially gmail) because of the complexity of Google apps.
PMs and testers are conspicuously absent from the process
Why the hell do you want project manager involved in development process when you are working with good engineers?
Google as an organization is not geared â" culturally â" to delivering enterprise class reliability to its user applications.
Are you fucking kidding? I know at least 4 major companies that run their email service using gmail.
I know (and work at one) companies that use Google office A LOT. Google maps is used widely in fleet tracking software and works perfectly and the API is not bad at all. Youtube? don't make me start talking about it's use in enterprise.
I've worked at both. In terms of working environment, I found them both to be good, though in different ways (better food, more excitement at Google; private office at Microsoft). In terms of quality of life, I prefer Seattle, but in terms of jobs and networking, the Bay Area wins. In terms of software development processes, Microsoft's may look better on paper, but Google's seems to be better at actually delivering. In terms of management... Ballmer makes me wince. So, so far, it's a toss up.
The question to me is where each company is going. When Google release a new product, there is buzz and excitement, and usually something expensive and complicated gets cheaper and simpler. When Microsoft releases a new product, people either shrug or shudder and hold on to their wallets. Microsoft keeps trying to change things (Zune, Live, whatever), they keep buying companies (Danger, whatever), and it just doesn't seem to be working for them. Given the choice, I'd probably choose to work for Google; I just don't see Microsoft going anywhere.
Sergey has left Google? SELL! SELL! SELL!
he'd rather have everything run by pointy head managers and fuckhead project managers that have never coded a line in their whole lives... go back to M$, you obviously can't handle freedom, so go back to code some visual basic or some other crap...
For once a chair related joke could actually be funny on slashdot. Yet,everyone is screwing it up. Incredible. It should be the opposite. What is the opposite of throwing a chair? Building a chair. Eric Schmidt should be happy someone who thinks microsoft is a better company is leaving his company. He should be so happy, he builds himself a celebration throne. or alternatively Balmer is happy and has a chair built.
Okay the joke still needs a bit of work, but its better than what was. Well, Sort of. I give myself a A for idea, but a C minus for implementation of that joke.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
...several sales associates left Walmart for Target.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Maybe Google needs to make the transition from 'new, up and coming' company to the 'larger, professional' company that it now is. (Or how many experienced workers / investors expect it to be.) Then again I've never been in the main workforce myself, I need to graduate for that to happen.
It's so ironic... open source programmers work KNOWING that their code will be useful for others. And yet he goes because he wants to see how much money he earns from code.
There, fixed.
P.S. Has anyone noticed the Irony that his blog is owned by Google? :)
P.P.S. Read the blog people, the guy's being hammered by his readers
P.P.P.S. I tagged the article "troll".
Wow. What is Sergey Solyanik smoking? It's been very obvious for many years that Microsoft design decisions are made for financial reasons, not technical ones.
-- Programming with boost is like building a house with lego. It's a cool but I wouldn't want to live in it
Ok so we have one guy who starts his essay with "Google sux!" and never actually worked for the company, only interviewed with them. Then we have two people who worked at Microsoft, then worked at Google and got hired back at Microsoft, and are now praising their current employer. How is this newsworthy?
Also someone who complains when "Everything is pretty much run by the engineering" and who uses phrases like "delivering enterprise class reliability to its user applications" is a marketing droid and should not be trusted. As a sidenote I find it funny that he criticizes Google's offerings with the statement "most of them primarily help people waste time online" listing Blogger as his first example, on Blogger itself.
We thought it's out of endless generosity and driven by open-source enthusiasm alone.
He is a friend of mine and in fact very smart and objective. The fact that Google didn't manage to hold on to him is a really worrying tell-tale about it. The fact that Blogspot is free means nothing here -- why not use GOOGs platform and AdSense to generate ad revenue from meaningful commentary? The fact that GOOGs management is worse than MSFTs doesn't mean one should refuse to make use and money off of GOOGs properties if GOOG lays them bare before you!
Sounds to me like this isn't about one place being better or worse than the other. Rather, that the blog author just likes Microsoft's old school, process heavy approach rather than Google's freestyle, open and engineer focus style.
Google is more suited for engineers while Microsoft is engineered for suits.
This article is basically Microsoft PR. Yeah yeah I recognize that you're dealing with a person or persons who did this of their own volition, but I'm sure there's more to the story than that. If I were a manager at Microsoft I'd try to get articles like this out there as well.
Free Conference Call -- No Spam, High Quality
There's a system of levels at Microsoft, and the "interestingness" of work, range of influence and pay depend on the levels (within limits predetermined for each level).
It's a well known fact that the easiest way to get a level increase at the higher levels is to leave Microsoft and then come back. Some folks jump over two levels after just two years outside the mothership - this is simply not achievable if you're L63-64. Sergey returned as (at least) L65. Good for him. Skipping his blog drivel, let's not assume that he did it for anything but a bag of cash and a large signing stock grant.
That said, Microsoft _is_ a great place to work, if you can ignore the bureaucracy. The pay is good, the benefits are second to none (no free lunches, tho), you get your own office (most of the time, anyway), and if you have a family, there's simply no better large tech company to work for.
Microsoft LOST it's reputation.
More like THREW IT AWAY, BY being agressive pushy assholes, for YEARS on end.
The BLANTANT VISTA MONEY GRAB (BVMG) spread the hate even to the rank and file.
Now every day, hordes of shills must battle the never ending ill will. The hate will never end.
Reasoning with Microsoft failed a long time ago. Now it is just hate. Pure hate. A hate that cannot be reasoned with.
Reap what you sow Microsoft.
And so Long Bill Gates.
Go help other people in other countries, because the ones on this continent all hate you.
Guy moves to microsoft, article explains how this manages to be the ultimate proof Microsoft is better than google. I guess it qualifies as stuff that matters...
Copyright infringement is "piracy" in the same way DRM is "consumer rape"
They are both huge huge corporations.
They both have a ton of acquired businesses, products, and services that are buried in their rubble of bloat.
And they both, to this day, only make money from selling what got them into the business in the first place. For google that would be Adsense, and for MS, Windows and Office.
So whichever company you choose, you probably won't make a difference, just like all the failed developers before you.
"Everything is pretty much run by [engineering]"
This is different from Microsoft how?
My experience there as an SDET showed me that development runs the show at Microsoft.
Why else would Steve Ballmer run around like a crazy man chanting "DEVELOPERS! DEVELOPERS! DEVELOPERS! DEVELOPERS! DEVELOPERS! DEVELOPERS!"
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
Everything microsoft does is geared towards department level computing. Their entire AD implementation is right out of 1986; Netware had better enterprise features. And somebody better tell Microsoft that had they simply used LDAP, they wouldn't have to blow billions on AD. Provisioning and employee lifecycle? They're the only major software company in the world with no solution there.
Their products ooze of something designed for a company with 100-1000 employees. Imagine that you have apps that when installed force servers to reboot. Imagine your major subsystems run as services so it becomes problematic when you what process level isolation of app server. Imagine to get an app server, you *must* install IIS. Imagine that when you want multiple versions of .NET, it's not as simple as just having multiple directories for each instance, you actually have to *install* it on the server with admin privileges.
My MS rep called the other day, and I said not interested since they have no enterprise architecture tools. He tried to sell me Sourcesafe and MS's IDE because "it has architecture tools in it". I pointed out that software engineering is not equal to enterprise architecture except in a most tangential way. He had no idea what I was talking about except to ask what "my definition" of Enterprise Architecture is. When a salesman has to challenge his customer that they don't understand, he/she is clearly not atuned to what's happening in the IT industry.
It goes on and on. It's like the entire thing at MS was designed by CompSci students who are killer coders, but don't have any idea of how to do things like master data management. They have no concept of a TDS versus an ODS. Everything at MS is a hodge-podge of cute little features that break down as soon as you try to do something more complex than "write a killer web page that pulls inventory in real time from a data base". Mind you, that's a great app for a small company, but stuff that you can do faster/cheaper with free solutions like linux/apache/mysql. I don't need to actually pay a large company for software licenses for crap like that.
Ironically, the scientists at MS have some great ideas and understand these concepts really well. The products, however, reflect none of that work. They're too busy locking in the OS with products. Like they're afraid their stuff won't sell on it's own, so you've got to buy the whole kit and kaboodle
I see MS as headed for a cliff as fast as their sales will take them. They're doomed in the same way IBM was doomed back in the late 80's.
Maybe because quality of life includes other factors besides the weather. And Seattle has ranked at the top in terms of quality of life for a long time. The bay area however isn't much further down the list.
Seattle has extremely mild weather year round that rarely causes enough discomfort that proper clothing can't fix. At worst its just cloudy too many days of the year. If you think that's the even remotely close to the worst you really should leave your bedroom sometime. 1 month in Tokyo during the rainy season will show you what messed up weather really is. A down poor at 80 degrees with extreme humidity in June is a lot worse than 60 degrees with overcast. A monsoon interrupting 100 degree whether is messed up, especially when you aren't surrounded by palm trees and coconuts.
So Google isn't "geared... culturally" to deliver enterprise class reliability.
What's Microsoft's excuse?
Game... blouses.
From TFA:
"Some of the web properties are useful (some extremely useful - search), but most of them primarily help people waste time online (blogger, youtube, orkut, etc).
All of them are free, and it's anyone's guess how many people would actually pay, say $5 per month to use Gmail. For me, this really does make the project less interesting if people are not willing to pay for it."
I don't know about that, but they will have to PAY me more than 5$ for using hotmail ever again!.
Just imagine a world where everybody has the same mentality as this guy: Einstein : "You know, who is going to pay me for this theory anyway?, what's the propose?, let's sell donuts"
Dare Obasanjo: "You really can't judge a company by the number of anti-trust cases."
From Dare Obasanjo's excerpts of Sergey Solyanik's blog, about Google: "Everything is pretty much run by the engineering - PMs and testers are conspicuously absent from the process. While they do exist in theory, there are too few of them to matter."
To me, the story lacks sufficient deep analysis to be sure we understand Mr. Solyanik's experiences.
I doubt that very many people are moving from "Do no evil" to "Doing a lot of evil is the only way we know to make a living".
What is Windows Vista but a rather unimportant update to Windows XP, that failed? Microsoft Word has new menus, but changing the menus also means that Microsoft now has two menu arrangement standards in use at the same time, and users must master them both. Internet Explorer version 7 has a third menu arrangement, further breaking the standard with which those who just want to use their computers are so familiar. TrueCrypt developers are talking about suing Microsoft in European court because of anti-trust violations.
Is that the direction successful people want to go?
To understand this story, it's good to know more about Dare Obasanjo, in my opinion. He's intelligent, he's a good communicator, and he has a history of being very effective at promoting himself. To me, his story is just him being himself, and promoting himself to Microsoft. Maybe it is not very indicative of what is happening at Microsoft.
Dare Obasanjo's excerpts of Sergey Solyanik's blog start with, "Last week I left Google to go back to Microsoft".
In contrast, Sergey Solyanik says "There are many things that Google does really well, and I plan to advocate that some of these things be adopted at Microsoft."
Mr. Solyanik went back to Microsoft because he didn't like the openness and lack of structure at Google. He wants more structure. He doesn't want to be a manager, and he doesn't want to decide himself the direction of what he is doing.
Dare Obasanjo's excerpts are misleading, in my opinion. As I said, he seems to me to be promoting himself to Microsoft, rather than understanding anything about why a particular person would quit Google after only a year there and go back to Microsoft. Also, Mr. Solyanik may have been given a very sweet deal; that is not discussed.
Hey, at least Blizzard makes quality games and aren't in production forever like some software companies! *cough* 3D Realms
1) If you're technical, go to Google 2) If you're not, go to Fuckroass
More: Note that Mr. Solyanik's profile has a link to MSFT needs an extreme makeover.
Quote:
"It's sobering to realize that during Ballmer's term as CEO, MSFT has underperformed almost all of its top tech peers (including AAPL, IBM, HPQ, SAP, INTC, CSCO, SYMC, NOK, ORCL, ADBE, RIMM, QCOM, Ebay, and AMZN), and badly lagged the major averages. We may even see our third plunge to test the 2000 lows during his watch. Unbelievable. There may be another major technology CEO with an equivalent or worse track record who is still in power, but a name doesn't come readily to mind."
In my opinion, Microsoft depends for much of its profit on adversarial behavior.
Both these behemoths have lost their ability to do anything truly interesting.
Just about the only thing that separates either of them is Google's promise "do no evil."
While there has been a touch of wiggling, they are more or less not evil yet.
in the stomach and out the mouth,
the worms crawl in the worms crawl out,
In the Stomach and Out the Mouth!
- crude childhood nursery rhyme
All pass beyond reach of medicine. None pass beyond the reach of love.
I've worked at a number of big, slow, sclerotic corporations. Each time I've left, I've been told stories about how tough the world is on the outside and how others who have attempted to make a go of it have returned. When I look at the people who returned, it became clear that the big, cruel world is an excellent filter for the sorts of people who can take risks and produce results. Those who can't will return to the womb. These people returning make the 'mommy company' all that much slower and bloated.
I've been approached to return, but if the company couldn't make it worth my while to get me to stick around, things have only gotten worse since I've left.
Have gnu, will travel.
What is "windows live".
Fixed that for you...
Try many, many hundreds of dollars I have happily given them for ad space. They do not need
to charge anything there are tens of thousands like myself that are paying for you to see those ads.
Got Code?
People are different and I'm glad of it. Imagine if everyone wanted to live in your city, work at your company, eat the same snacks as you...... that would suck big time!
Engineering is the art of compromise.
A friend of mine is a SDET as MS, apparently the other end of the spectrum is scary as well, MS believes that automated testing will carry them over despite the fact that reality shows differently.
On the other hand having dealt with the Google apps API I have to agree with the idea that Google's not quite all there, but then again who is?
Any and all content posted above may be ignored, considered irrelevant, or otherwise dismissed.
As currently implemented its not impossible to create de facto nesting if you use filtering but it is annoying. (For instance, label Parent, label LeafA, and Leaf B, every time you use LeafA, also label Parent, etc). On the other hand I'm not sure that it actually is a necessary feature or just one people expect.
Conceptually you certainly could. GMail currently doesn't allow filtering by label, but if it did you'd have de facto nesting (If label LeafA, apply Parent label).
Google as an organization is not geared â" culturally â" to delivering enterprise class reliability to its user applications.
And Microsoft is? Oh please, spare me.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Software is a machine with thousands of moving parts running on a machine with with several billion moving parts.
The issue with moving parts as a point of failure is that they are prone to breaking on their own. When software fails it is the fault of the programmer, not some mysterious things that are breaking in spite of him.
While I somewhat agree with your sentiment that we should cut programmers some slack, I still believe it is possible for software to work right with very little debugging. If a programmer is spending more time debugging than coding, he's doing it wrong... either that or marketing needs to quit making him bolt on features that the system was never designed to support).
to send someone over to the competition to scope things out before returning to the fold.
I watched it happen at my former employer.
is actually trying to f-ing kill Google, or is it really all about developers developers developers? I had to duck as he threw a chair at me. :) Just kidding I am not unfortunate enough to work for Steve Ballmer, not that I would want to anyway, I hear he has anger issues. :) Maybe as much as Jack Tremial of Commodore and later Atari had, with his Jack Attacks they named a video game after them. :)
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
Windows Live's family filter blocks Google as a bad web site. Gee I wonder why?
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
"Google as an organization is not geared â" culturally â" to delivering enterprise class reliability to its user applications." Whatever that means. And Microsoft is geared towards reliability and scalability? Are you kidding? Please. Microsoft will be king of the desktop for the rest of my life, probably. For my money it does not make enterprise grade anything.
Damping absorbs vibrations. Dampening is caused by moisture.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
You're correct, of course.
So... does this mean there's more openings at Google? So I've got more a chance of getting hired? Does it? Please?
Seriously, looking around Slashdot, I feel like I'm the only human being who HASN'T worked at Google...
Even more: It is easy to imagine that Mr. Ballmer's competition with Google is partly in offering top developers extremely sweet deals. So, to do the best for themselves, they need to go from Microsoft to Google and back every few years.
You might have dozens of folders for your bookmarks too. Well, del.icio.us uses tags and searching to organize bookmarks, and you may have noticed that has not held it back. Perhaps you have all your photos carefully organized into folders. Well Flickr shows us that tags and searching works very well to organize photos. Wikipedia pages are tagged. Everyone knows how to use Google to search for information. The metaphors in the Gmail interface are very well established in the populace.
In addition, I find your comment to be pretty pointless because it does not describe an actual need. "Moving an e-mail to a folder" is not an information- or user-oriented need, it is a tool. It is a means not an end. An actual user need would be something like "find this e-mail easily later" or "keep all e-mails from my bank together." Needs like these are easily met with labels and searching, used together.
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
the hierarchical organisation bit earlier if that's what you meant.
Clearly everyone doesn't automatically assume that to be defining characteristic of folders. "Folders" describes a container type, not the way those containers are themselves organised.
I think people would generally refer to that as a tree, so perhaps a "folder tree" might be what you want.
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
Click "Select: All"
Click "Archive"
Click "All Mail" from the left hand menu
Click "Select: Unread"
Click "More Actions" -> "Move To Inbox"
From this point, when you read an email, apply appropriate labels and then click "Archive" when you've finished dealing with them.
There are no winners, just a whole lot of losers.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
But they have. Gmail itself is perpetually in beta (at least until now) because Gmail is the latest version of the code that's available to the world, but stable editions of the code-base have been moved to Google Apps where it certainly isn't in beta. You don't even have to pay Google for a non-beta form, or even to connect your own domain to a Google Mail account, though you probably can't move your existing GMail address to Google Apps.
That said, I personally prefer GMail being in beta if that's what it takes. Google's demonstrated itself as easily being reliable enough to handle my email with what it considers Beta software, as long as I can download my email over pop3 from time to time for my own backup copy, but I'd want my own copy regardless.
They won't introduce many of their non-completely-tested Google Labs features in the Google Apps codebase where customers (some of whom pay) expect something stable and predictible, but they will make them available in GMail, and don't even require me to switch them on.
nt
nosig today
He writes, 'Everything is pretty much run by [engineering] -- PMs and testers are conspicuously absent from the process. Google as an organization is not geared -- culturally -- to delivering enterprise class reliability to its user applications.
it sounds like microsoft just dosn't like the idea that google make FREE stuff, instead of highly overpriced and ""COPY PROTECTED" material.
There are many things that Google does really well, and I plan to advocate that some of these things be adopted at Microsoft.
Microsoft is copying, again.
XEROX PARC - GUI .Net
Lotus, WordStar, dBASE - Office, FoxPro
Java - WORA -
RDBMS - Sybase
UNIX - ACL
Google Search, Yahoo Web - Live
Adobe Flash, Java Games - Silverlight
Google Processes - management - ??
?? === cutting flab - expect some layoffs or transfers to "promote software in thrid world to enrich the lives of poor" - that neatly explains billg's "move to philanthrophy" - he's a slimy bastard from day one - he'll go in the name of studying living conditions and study the market personally and very, very carefully.
Then sit with some scum at various 3-letter fuckups in the US Govt, get some priority treatment for getting in bed with them and "bail out" MS from their huge technical fuckup called Vista.
These are guys who decided to leave after studying the way Google works for one year.
No suprise here, recconnaisance in the open.
Hackers have long memories. It works both ways.
So what you yoink people that can make you a search engine? Too bad MS will never win since their only base is people that use windows, and after vista that number will decrease unless you start to offer good product.
To bad google(youtube n goggle video dominate tho bitgravity is by far the best streaming company) will be the next big corporation and it does not require a buissness model of trying to resell a less effective OS then the last version.
He heard Bill retired, and is hoping to take over after Ray fails with Ballmer... Maybe he had better friends there at MS or had left projects half way done he wants to finish... Maybe he is just a glutton for punishment... Who knows but himself internally. Most public announcements are excuses you BS to convince yourself you made the right decision.
I should have said that he wants someone to manage him, closely.
One of my objectives in life was to be working for Google. I heard about how is working for them, and getting surprised of how the Google Plex physically is.
I've just left a work which was professionally interesting but stressing (and so was "killing me softly"). After realise I was "burnt out" and loosing happiness about programming, I decided to make a 180 degrees turn in my life. Now I work only 35 hours a week, but continue investigating in my passion (programming). Even I am doing my own businesses in the evenings, like teaching. Of course I earn much less money than before, but I'd rather prefer living my life with good life conditions, than making someone even richer because of my very hard work, and become a grumbling person forever.
Perhaps this is because I am from Spain, or perhaps I'd do this in any other country..
Apparently you've never been to New Jersey. You can't pump you own gas there, either. It's a wise guy thing.
Barack Obama is going to get a job at microsoft?
Oh, right. So it was nothing to do with the fact that maybe Microsoft offered him a higher salary then? I just throw that one in.
Personally, I don't give a shit & fail to see why this is news, even if programmers were leaving Microsoft for Google.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
Well, rather than "Funny", I'd call that "Informative." A tool is only as useful as it fits someone's needs. I don't care how cool your ballpoint-pen/hatchet/banana-carrying-case combo is from an engineering viewpoint, if it doesn't do what I need, I'm not buying it.
Now I'm not saying one should put marketing completely in charge either, but _someone_ has to give some input about what the customers want too.
That said, having actually RTFA, I'm surprised that Google doesn't have bigger problems. Letting the engineers run things by committee sounds like a recipe for trouble, and I'm saying that as an engineer. Point in case:
- from my experience testers are a valuable resource, and too often the coders (and particularly stupid managers) see them as the enemy, the guys who pick on our lovely code and get in the way of our getting the praise we deserve. They're also easy to bully or otherwise silence. That's also speaking from practice. E.g., you tell one to leave a module alone 'cause you plan to fix it later, lo and behold, a year later he's still leaving it alone 'cause you "forgot" to tell him that he can resume testing it.
At some point you need _someone_ to tell all the Wallys to get to fixing the stuff on that known bugs list already, or to decide, basically, OK, this thing goes into QA now. That someone is effectively a manager. Whether it's hired as one, or you have some fucked-up elective monarchy or committee, it's still a manager by any other name. He's doing a management job. Might as well just admit that that's a manager.
At any rate, well, big surprise, he then says that the testers are too few and they make no difference. Whop-de-do. You put the coders in charge and have a corporate mentality that it's ok to be a perpetual beta, you get just that. It's as predictable as leaving the schoolkids in charge, and then wondering why you have no teachers or exams.
Now it may be ok at Google, where they still claim to be a beta even after more than a decade, but it wouldn't work at most other companies. Can you imagine shipping an OS as a perpetual beta? Yes, I know, Windows, bla, bla, bla. Let's put it like this: it had all those problems when MS thought it's fully tested. Can you imagine how bad it would be if it were shipped as a beta and without much tester input at that? Right. That's what I'm trying to say.
- power vacuums don't work well with humans. Anarchy is a fine concept in theory, but it doesn't quite work in practice. Either someone effectively ends up the de-facto leader, or you get a chaos with lots of backroom politics and backstabbing games and committee groupthink games.
And whop-de-do, it sounds like he got fed up with the politics there. Who would have guessed? Right.
But neither is ideal. Just because someone knew how to pretend to be everyone's friend, to get himself accepted as a community leader, doesn't mean he also is any good as a manager. It's just Peter's Principle or the Dilbert Principle, except without a higher power which could remove or sideline an incompetent mid-level manager. And likely he'll not even have the authority to take any unpopular decision.
- just because someone is passionate about something, it doesn't mean it's necessarily the best way to do something, or even necessary.
I just need to look around at work. There are plenty of people who are passionate about some cool technology aspect, but I see _none_ among the coders who are passionate about some business concept and almost none who even have any clue about usability. (We had a guy who thought he's qualified to talk about usability because he's a Mac user, but funnily he produced the worst GUI anyone had ever seen. The people who actually had to use it, quickly proclaimed it to be b
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
They were at M$, but they knew google was geared toward the futur so they jumped. Then, they realised that only competent people with their mouth not full of s*** could work at google, so they jumped back to M$.
/trolling /end of trolling
Engineering? They are programmers, not engineers.
"enterprise class reliability to its user applications" - So that's what they call the overpriced and lacking features... a.k.a. Vista!
as a project manager I am offended. You don't realise that without us the projects would finish on time, and be tested properly. I mean really what would the world be without a project manager...
Oh, MSN, Hotmail, MSN Messenger, OneCare and other Microsoft services aren't very interesting. No wonder its not very well known.
yea. we know how reliable microsoft is in delivering enterprise class reliability.
... what happens to the people who bought it ? well. you'll see.
not only that, we know how reliable microsoft in general. windows 7 in 2009, whereas vista was just new and forcefully shoved to clients in many ways
after reading that excerpt, i lost all the appetite to read TFA. if such people are jumping ships, they better should.
Read radical news here
Too many marketing organizations put more weight behind 'partners' who take them golfing or dining than what the customer actually wants. I find marketing as likely to overlook the actual end-users (paying or not) as engineers in favor of their own particular proclivities.
A significant part of the role of project management is externalizing what the engineers *should* have themselves, self-restraint. When you partner very bright, passionate engineers with no restraint and impose PMs on them to rein them in, the engineers morale is going to go down because part of the whole point of the PMs are to be as much of a 'killjoy' as it takes to offset the engineers' unconstrained enthusiasm.
In general, I think good engineers need a large amount of self-restraint to complement what passion they have. I'm personally involved in a PM-absent project in a typically very PM-heavy ecosystem. The engineers in this case understand and interact directly with the customers and have a lot of self-restraint. We have met our stated business dates more consistantly than our peer PM led efforts and are successfully managing maintenance branches without being prodded to do so by someone whose sole job is to prod. We picked a representative sample of engineers from various places to lead and people are mature enough to reach a consensus even if they disagree with the decision.
This may not be realistic for all, but I'd like to think it shows well-rounded, mature engineers are better than mixing all the extremes together and externalizing the balance of various aspects of people in general.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
This shouldn't surprise anyone. Microsoft is making a foray into the area that Google is now controlling. So whatever they are doing can be easily influenced by the developers. Also, a lot of Google employees came from MS. People might not like them, but they do employ some of the brightest in the industry. These people are not ego-centric and have to have their names on every website (including Slashdot) to make a difference. They didn't get that large/rich/powerful by having average people doing the work.
ibm has reinvented itself and adapted to times. microsoft is staunchly refusing to do it.
Read radical news here
you could take any two large companies in a similar industry and find people that were leaving one to go to another.
He writes, 'Everything is pretty much done by people who can do â" worthless bureaucrats are conspicuously absent from the process. Google as an organization is not geared â" culturally â" to letting me slack off in a high-paying job while others produce enterprise class reliability in its user applications.'
'Bout right.
If you can't be a king where you are
go to where you can be a king!
ZING!
Or:
Google employee goes to MS, average IQ in both companies raised!
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
I've interned at Microsoft three times and currently work at Google just down the street from Microsoft.
It's called competition. Both companies are successful and do things differently. THIS IS GOOD. It means Software Engineers have choice about how they want to work, and aren't pigeon holed into a single paradigm. Google won't work for everyone, I've had to make adjustments myself, but Microsoft doesn't work for everyone either.
"Not knowing when the dawn will come, I open every door." - Emily Dickinson
You'd think an 18,000 person company would be able to release a finished project once in a while.
Yeah, because applying concepts geared towards mailing magtapes is so apropos to online web apps.
I can't think of any Google 'beta' where I thought, "man this sucks," (that's what Google Labs is for.
Similarly I can't think of the last time Google was down. I know, unreliable, unlike my rock-solid Win2K3 server that only restarts randomly asking me to send a 2GB memory dump to Microsoft...
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Sam Kinison said that Austin girls gave the best blowjobs.......
Or Austin was the blowjob capital of the US....
something on that note...any residents care to comment....
Look at it this way. You are a Microsoft employee so you feel really cool about your awesome leet self. Then you feel that you want a change of scenery so you accept a job at Google. You walk in the front door with your head held high, knowing that your resume has 'Microsoft' backing it. You soon realize that everyone around you is far more intelligent and productive with extraordinary ideas and vision. They associate you with Vista and so they look down on you and treat you like an incompetent nuinsance. In meetings, everyone talks fast, you can't keep track of what's going on, and you know very little of the discussed topics. When you finally do get a chance to say something, a dozen engineers simultaneously cut in and argue on how stupidly impossible, backward, rediculous and redundant your silly thoughts are. You are then asked to either leave the meeting or just be quiet and listen. Word quickly gets around about your shortcomings and before you know it, even janitors are speaking to you slowly with hand gestures and condescending tones. After a few weeks of crying yourself to sleep at night, you decide that you just can't take it anymore and run back to your old job, where you're accepted and you fit in with the warm family of incompetent retards, who spend hours a day spinning around in their chairs, wearing safety helmets, and having group sing alongs of nursery rhymes after complimenting each others' stupid ideas on future software.
Yeah, I'd go back too.
"Google as an organization is not geared -- culturally -- to delivering enterprise class reliability to its user applications."
And Microsoft is?
Bwahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahah!!!!
Now there's a fucking moron!
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
During the late-70s/early-80s anti-tax crusade (during which Reagan was ascendant), Proposition 13 put quite stringent limits on property taxes that in effect mandated that they would always decrease in real terms, even if the property increased in value.
Under Prop 13, a property is valued when it's purchased. Thereafter, its taxable value can only go up by 1% per year. Since this is generally less than inflation, and much less than property-price appreciation, in effect the longer you own a property, the lower taxes you pay on it. This leads to people like Warren Buffet owning million-dollar houses that they pay taxes on as if they were worth $100,000 (Buffet himself admits this is ridiculous).
So where does the money come from? From new construction and new entrants to the state, who have to pay taxes at current assessments (since they just bought in). But many of these people are recent college graduates and new immigrants, neither of whom are particularly wealthy or good sources of reliably large tax revenues.
Quite apart from bankrupting the state, it also has the effect of being a hugely regressive tax, where the rich generally pay much lower property taxes than the less-rich. In addition, it's created a landed aristocracy---the privilege of paying lower property taxes than new immigrants is, inexplicably, inheritable.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
"All of them are free, and it's anyone's guess how many people would actually pay, say $5 per month to use Gmail. For me, this really does make the project less interesting if people are not willing to pay for it."
I wonder how much he paid for the Blogger account, which is run by Google.
One way is deferring property taxes until sale. That way, as long as you live in the house, you get pay the old tax rate, but if you sell out into the market at the now-much-higher valuations, you have to pay the back taxes out of the capital gains (up to the gains).
The current system lets people not only live in their very-valuable houses without paying the fully valued taxes on them, but also lets them keep those increases when they sell out. People who benefited from 20+ years of lower taxes intended to let them remain in their homes should not get to keep the gains also; those gains should go to reimburse the state for the lost taxes once the person has decided that they no longer in fact wish to live there.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
If the purpose was really just to let people stay in their homes without being priced out, that'd be one thing. But this proposition was written by a far-right anti-tax group funded largely by business, and the results show. If they wanted just that one effect, they could've made Prop 13 only apply to owner-occupied residences. But it doesn't.
It applies also, for example, to second homes and beach condos (which is why Buffet benefits), and even to commercial property. So landlords in areas without rent control get to pocket the profits from increased land values, without having to pay their fair share in increased property taxes. How is that a noble goal?
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
I don't mean to be condescending, just helpful. It's pretty easy to do since all the e-mails are coming from one source.
You go to settings and create a new filter, with myspace as the from address. After clicking "next", you have actions to choose from. One of them is to apply a label, which will help keep them all "together" for easier review later. But another one is to "skip the inbox" which sends them straight into the Archive (i.e. hides them from view).
If you want to review them first, just have the filter set the label. Then later after you're read them, you can click that label name in the lower-left green box to find them all. Then click the "select all" link at the top, then choose archive from download. It sounds like a lot of steps but it is very fast since you don't have to manually select each one. The label is applied automatically by the filter upon receipt, and it lets you select and move them all around at once.
You can always archive things manually as well. Just check the box for the ones you want to hide, and choose "Archive" from the drop-down box.
You can also use a search...for instance search your entire inbox for messages with "myspace" in the from field, and "friend request" (or whatever) in the subject line. Once you get the results list, you can again click the Select All link, then use the drop down to Archive.
Once you get the hang of it I think you'll find it is faster and easier to manage. Once you learn it, you can use it effectively--that's what people usually mean by "intuitive." But it is not obvious...it does a little effort to learn. Hope this was helpful.
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
It really surprises me that the secret the Google writes such shitty code has been a secret for so long. Just read some posts on their developers forums like this one from Google Checkout Developers Forum: http://groups.google.com/group/google-checkout-api-troubleshooting/browse_thread/thread/b71b46d34315a535# They seem to create a bunch of crap that does not work, get bored with it and then move on to produce some new crap that also does not function. You can really see this in most non-search applications: adwords, video ads, google base, checkout, app engine. the further away from search it seems the crappier the code.
Developer levels start at 59 and top out at around 67. And past L64, rarely does your level has to do anything with technical skills.
If you're already there, you may or may not leave if they give you bupkis instead of a bonus. If you're not an employee, however, they better sweeten the pot if they hope to ever get you to join.