4 ms·

Google and Microsoft both do a great job shipping certain kinds of products. The teams that work on these products have influence, autonomy and ability (without

by strlen 16y ago

Google and Microsoft both do a great job shipping certain kinds of products. The teams that work on these products have influence, autonomy and ability (without middle management or PM interference) to ship products. For Microsoft it's Office tools, development tools and operating systems. We may not like those products, nor wish to work on those teams irrespective (I'm a UNIX hacker, there's no way I'd be happy at Microsoft, lest they bring back Xenix), but I'd imagine those teams are great to work on. For Google, it's obviously search, infrastructure (incredible competitive advantage for them), advertising system and other things Internet or networking (including Android, Chrome etc...). It's not their office or enterprise offerings (Google docs are useful, but they're popular because they're only game in town so far). I wouldn't join Microsoft to work on online services or join Google to work on desktop or enterprise products (with exception of Chromium). I would imagine I'd be sidelined by management or technical leadership who is just not used to that particular type of software (e.g., if you make shrink wrap office software you'd be hesitant to adopt methodologies that involve daily pushes of code or see the value of making services highly available and fault tolerant). Of course, I am open to hear arguments to the contrary (do you work on online services at Microsoft and find that you're able to "get things done" without interference? Ditto for desktop software at Google).

kenjackson 16y ago
I don't work for MS, but I must admit I'm impressed with Bing. Is it better than Google? Maybe not, but it's still impressive. And they certainly seem to rev changes to it just as fast as Google is doing nowadays. We'll see how Office online plays out. And don't forget that MS Online Services has like 40million paying customers. They also do something called XBox Live and even Hotmail has gotten a little better over time. And I find Live Mesh to be the best cloud sync'ing app I've ever used. All in all, I think they're doing OK (not great, but OK).
- strlen 16y ago
  > I don't work for MS, but I must admit I'm impressed with Bing. That's not surprising, given the person running Bing is Qi Lu. There's a reason they brought in an outsider: they just couldn't afford to screw this attempt up. I've had the enormous privilege of working in his organization at Yahoo (I still have no idea how I was able to fool my interview panel into hiring me straight out of college and into that group). That experience gave me an extremely highly bar in terms of choosing engineering organizations to work for. There's only a couple of non-startup companies I am willing to work at after this experience: most everyone else - including non-search parts of Yahoo - just does not get how to run an online service and are unwilling to listen to a young punk like me :-)
  - jacabado 16y ago
    So what do you look for when choosing those organizations? (And if possible how to do that, multiple interviews, experience period?) Being in my second job right now my heuristics are: - Strong and clear team leadership - Fitness to value proposition, besides my work as a developer how well can I contribute to help improving the organization Would love to hear from you how to be more selective.
holygoat 16y ago
I can't give details, but in my experience your view of Microsoft is incorrect. If anything, the converse is true: core business teams offer less opportunity to do something great, because they're bigger and less flexible. I didn't choose Microsoft, but I had an overly simplistic view of things.

by strlen 16y ago

kenjackson 16y ago

I don't work for MS, but I must admit I'm impressed with Bing. Is it better than Google? Maybe not, but it's still impressive. And they certainly seem to rev changes to it just as fast as Google is doing nowadays. We'll see how Office online plays out. And don't forget that MS Online Services has like 40million paying customers. They also do something called XBox Live and even Hotmail has gotten a little better over time. And I find Live Mesh to be the best cloud sync'ing app I've ever used. All in all, I think they're doing OK (not great, but OK).

strlen 16y ago
> I don't work for MS, but I must admit I'm impressed with Bing. That's not surprising, given the person running Bing is Qi Lu. There's a reason they brought in an outsider: they just couldn't afford to screw this attempt up. I've had the enormous privilege of working in his organization at Yahoo (I still have no idea how I was able to fool my interview panel into hiring me straight out of college and into that group). That experience gave me an extremely highly bar in terms of choosing engineering organizations to work for. There's only a couple of non-startup companies I am willing to work at after this experience: most everyone else - including non-search parts of Yahoo - just does not get how to run an online service and are unwilling to listen to a young punk like me :-)
- jacabado 16y ago
  So what do you look for when choosing those organizations? (And if possible how to do that, multiple interviews, experience period?) Being in my second job right now my heuristics are: - Strong and clear team leadership - Fitness to value proposition, besides my work as a developer how well can I contribute to help improving the organization Would love to hear from you how to be more selective.

holygoat 16y ago

I can't give details, but in my experience your view of Microsoft is incorrect. If anything, the converse is true: core business teams offer less opportunity to do something great, because they're bigger and less flexible. I didn't choose Microsoft, but I had an overly simplistic view of things.