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Why Microsoft?
theodp writes "Before a large crowd of students at the University of Washington computer science department, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer was asked why students should care about Microsoft enough to want to work there. Aside from the ending, which begs for an if-you're-happy-and-you-know-it-clap-your-hands remix, Ballmer seemed to handle the question adequately for an MBA-type, although TechCrunch has a different opinion, suggesting 'maybe it's time for the great salesman to hang it up.' Oddly enough, a recent resignation letter from a Microsoft developer en route to Facebook ('Microsoft has been an awesome place to work over the past twelve years. In college, I never thought I'd work for Microsoft. Then I interned in 1997 and fell in love.') may be more what the skeptical CS student was looking for in terms of a Microsoft endorsement."
Right, even though M$ offers a higher starting salary out of college (~80k for a CPE vs 65k from LMC), I chose not to interview with them when I was offered because I felt like I would be a hypocrite for working for a company that conflicts with my moral and ideological beliefs.
while(1) attack(People.Sandy);
Microsoft is and always has had a good reputation as a place to work. A lot of the senior managers came up from the trenches and do care about the working environment.
I mean, say what you want about their business practices, quality of software and anything else, they've always come across as a good employer.
I'm happy to assist dictators but draw the line at working for Steve Ballmer
We are constantly inventing new phrases and new usages. Why raid an ancient and well used phrase, disembowel it, and stuff a completely new meaning inside? If you want to play alien body snatcher, do it with real humans, not with time honoured Latin phrases.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
A friend that recently departed from M$ said the internal organizations are so politicized other groups would refuse cooperation or willfully withheld information "because they can."
ELOI, ELOI, LAMA SABACHTHANI!?
Never having worked at Microsoft, I couldn't comment about them.
Having worked at Google, I can comment about them: MacBooks are perhaps the single, most popular, laptop. iPhones are very common with perhaps the only reason why there are a lot of Google phones is because people got them for free as their Christmas bonus/gift. I would say that iPhones are probably the most popular personal phones which employees actually paid for.
Not everything is completely open at Google, except maybe most of the source code. Like any large corporation, some individuals have carved out their personal empires along with all the associated politics...
No sig. Move along - nothing to see here.
Sorry, I'm most a Linux guy these days but your post is nonsense.
Whatever you or I know or think about Vista and Windows 7, clearly Microsoft had "real challenges" getting both those OSes out and both of them made at least some attempt of getting over some of the "real problems" of inexperienced Windows XP users & XP's architecture, both of which (to some degree) allow applications to run with more permissions than they need but exploit security holes as a result.
And, incidentally, I work for a telecoms company where 95% of our products run on Red Hat Linux - yet many of my colleagues have been victims of "random downsizing", simply because the need to show profit has nothing to do with what OS you happen to be using.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.