7 ms·

Why I joined Microsoft

84 points by sharjeelsayed 9y ago

jaclaz 9y ago
>The impact I’ll have at a company like Microsoft will be huge and at the end of the day, that’s what it’s about, right? Hmmm. Modest, not all over, but in spots.
sheraz 9y ago
The no-so-subtle cosmosDB pitch missed the real killer feature: mongodb compatibility And hipaa compliant. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/cosmos-db/mongodb-introduction https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/cosmos-db/mongodb-int... I'm not shilling just a happy azure user.
type0 9y ago
MS has gone full circle now and they are on "Embrace" stage now. Just wait for "Extend" and then it will be on "Extinguish" all over again.
mwerty 9y ago
Reminds me of http://www.fakesteve.net/2009/11/hell-hath-no-fury-like-a-borgocrat-scorned.html http://www.fakesteve.net/2009/11/hell-hath-no-fury-like-a-bo...
francesca 9y ago
Looks like this article was sponsored by MSFT.
vosper 9y ago
> Proud thinker. Avid creator. Devoted explorer. Incurable student. Humble Gopher. Principal Developer Advocate @Microsoft. TL;DR, she's really taking the advocacy thing seriously: apparently Microsoft is amazing (and there's a subtle digestion that Pivotal doesn't pay as well, and maybe isn't a interesting)
- haskellandchill 9y ago
  Pivotal doesn't pay well but it can be plenty interesting.
VengefulCynic 9y ago
“There is no loyalty in business, Ashley. You’re a single mom. You have a family and you owe it to them to see this Microsoft interview through.” A truth that is not repeated nearly often enough by employees.
- toomuchtodo 9y ago
  Indeed. Don't love your job because it isn't going to love you back.
  - deathhand 9y ago
    I don't like this comment because individuals can "love working with you" and make sure that there is always a necessary flow of capital(if possible).
    - toomuchtodo 9y ago
      Feel free to not care for my comment. It comes from 15 years of work experience. I find that it holds true. Your mileage may vary. A job is a transaction; no more, no less. Treat it as such.
      - johnchristopher 9y ago
        Or self-fulfilling prophecy ? Sarcasm apart, mileage really does vary a lot and it depends on personality, colleagues, the industry, the company or the clients and other factors I can't think of. But these have to be considered nonetheless to sail the seas of work. I like your phrasing: "it's not going to love you back".
    - GuiA 9y ago
      I have loved working with certain people, that didn't protect them from being laid off by higher ups. What you're both saying isn't mutually exclusive. Your job isn't going to love you back - if a bunch of people get laid off and you're in that bunch, tough luck. But on the other hand, yes, you should do your best to be the kind of person your colleagues are excited to interact with.
atdt 9y ago
It turns out that Microsoft has the largest number of the top 500 Open Source projects for any one entity. Top 500 according to whom / what?
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- ddlutz 9y ago
  I was curious about this myself, but it looks like they are the highest open source contributor on Github according to https://octoverse.github.com https://octoverse.github.com.
- dankohn1 9y ago
  In my measurement of the 30 highest velocity open source projects [0], Microsoft has VS Code, .NET and Office Developer. [0] https://www.cncf.io/blog/2017/06/05/30-highest-velocity-open-source-projects/ https://www.cncf.io/blog/2017/06/05/30-highest-velocity-open...
  - pjmlp 9y ago
    A few Haskell and OCaml researchers are also on MSR payroll. They are also contribuing for Go on Windows and the main contributors for Go tooling on VSCode.
43224gg252 9y ago
"Because they hired me".
nickpsecurity 9y ago
Microsoft is such a huge corporation that it has many teams that act totally opposite one another. Being in or dealing with any one can blind you to what the overall company is like. It seems she's in one of the better groups. Personally, I've always loved Microsoft Research specifically since they do great stuff. Practical example: their driver, verification tool is the reason it doesn't blue screen so much anymore. They did another OS (VerveOS) proven safe down to assembly. Neat stuff. Then, there's the groups pushing garbage on enterprises with plenty of lock-in. Then, there's also what I read where the workers in many parts have a pretty stable job whose environment and structure works out better than usual for women, people with families, or just those wanting work/life balance Silicon Valley usually won't give them. The bigger tech companies often rate better than startups and such on those points. Overall, though, I think she's wrong about Microsoft changing. They're not. They have patents, copyrights, and data/protocol lock-in guaranteeing billions a year in profits for them. Changing would cost them much of that which will never happen. Far as open-source, they've gotten over a billion dollars off Android alone in patent royalties from their legal team despite doing everything they could to eliminate Android in favor of Windows Phone. Royalties not earned for sure. They did some Linux contributions to support running it on their own hypervisor pursuing more lock-in at other levels. Even many of the MS Research inventions are patented with who knows what risk. They continue to pay off politicians to make things worse for the rest of us like in U.S. w/ patent/copyright laws or Munich trying to uproot the FOSS conversion. They're the same, evil company that's trying to adjust to a FOSS-friendly world in a way that lets them suck money out of that too at everyone's expense. All that said, you can make an impact if you work at Microsoft on improving one of their huge, legacy products. Or even a new one with a high-chance of adoption. It might be a decent choice if aiming for the greater good. An easy example would be anything stopping code injection in Windows systems would be great in terms of damage prevented for that user and anyone their box DDOS'd. Reliability or integrity of data, too, as who wants to loose their most critical files at the worst time. Definitely good to be done even if they're evil. Just gotta determine if you want to do good for Microsoft's customers or improve things that will keep people away from them.
rdtsc 9y ago
> As a Developer Advocate, you’re spreading awareness and enabling developers to do what they love; write, code, and learn. Can someone explain that some more how that position is supposed to work. Maybe an example where DA made an impact for them personally. Otherwise that description sounds a bit like a rename of the traditional HR department.
- ocdtrekkie 9y ago
  I don't understand how you view Developer Advocates like HR. Developer Advocates work with external developers using and building on your platforms. Wholly different skill set, nothing to do with employee management.
  - vxNsr 9y ago
    The confusion stems around the word "developer" OP is thinking of internal devs, while the role is actually about interfacing with outside devs who will be using/extending products and services the org makes. It's an easy mistake to make if you don't give it too much thought because there's no inherent explanation in "Developer Advocate" that would indicate we're talking about outside devs.
  - rdtsc 9y ago
    > I don't understand how you view Developer Advocates like HR. Well I don't understand that's why I asked. But I see that just lead to down-votes and confusion. > Developer Advocates work with external developers using and building on your platforms. Ah! I thought they are advocating for internal developers. As in "management and other departments don't have developers' needs in mind but the person in this position does, and they serve as point of contact for help".
- fenomas 9y ago
  A developer advocate is someone who advocates the company's offerings to developers, and makes sure feedback from developers reaches internal teams. In practice this usually means going to a lot of dev conferences, making speeches, working with product management, making tutorials and sample apps, and stuff like that. So, borderline relationship with marketing, nothing at all to do with HR. Source: former developer evangelist.
0x8BADF00D 9y ago
I don't care how much Microsoft says they've changed. Much like I know Facebook will never change when its founder called users of his platform "dumb fucks".
bsaul 9y ago
ms still has a long way to go imho. i recently thought about developping my backend on fsharp with dotnet core, on a mac. Well, let me just say that the commitment of ms to some of their open source projects leave to be desired. documentation is painfully hard to find ( compare to apple or even java main web frameworks, where everything is neatly organized in one place), community is inexistant, the main "getting started" videos on youtube is obsolete ( project file format changed in the meantine)... And the only fsharp plugin for vscode is developped by a third company and requires mono to be installed, for some reason. Maybe it's just that nobody uses fsharp though. So then i tried to find some general architectural overview of asp.net core, and i didn't even know where to start looking. Ms documentation site is a maze, and you can only find short articles on very detailled subject, but nothing really top down. Now the reason for all that is of course that the MS users ecosystem is made of consulting companies selling "experts", and training companies selling training. Nobody there has any interest in good, free, online resources.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- oblio 9y ago
  They truly have a long way to go, especially concerning awareness. But I feel that things will pick up once they release dotnet core 2.0, which will support dotnet standard 2.0, basically the equivalent to the Java base libraries. Up to now things were still in flux and nobody serious wanted to touch the stuff. Now they've mostly settled down.
RandyRanderson 9y ago
Tl;DR Is one of the reasons job security? I bet it isn't. 2014 18k jobs - https://www.wired.com/2014/07/microsoft-layoffs/ https://www.wired.com/2014/07/microsoft-layoffs/ 2015 8k layoffs - http://fortune.com/2015/07/08/microsoft-layoffs/ http://fortune.com/2015/07/08/microsoft-layoffs/ 2016 3k - http://fortune.com/2016/07/28/microsoft-layoffs-thousands-phone/ http://fortune.com/2016/07/28/microsoft-layoffs-thousands-ph... 2017 Q1 700 - http://www.businessinsider.com/about-700-microsoft-employees-to-be-laid-off-sources-say-2017-1 http://www.businessinsider.com/about-700-microsoft-employees... 2017 Q3 3k-5k https://techcrunch.com/2017/07/06/microsoft-confirms-layoff-reports-reorganization-expected-to-impact-thousands/ https://techcrunch.com/2017/07/06/microsoft-confirms-layoff-... It's hard to tell if the numbers overlap. For context MS has about 100k employees.
- Markoff 9y ago
  yeah and those are only direct employees, i worked for Microsoft vendor and we had ratio 1 Microsoft employee to 150 outsourced workers project on our site shrinked from 150-200 at peak to 25-30 in the end
gaius 9y ago
though I was getting daily emails from Microsoft recruiters Really? They were emailing every day? I call shenanigans, no-one wants to hire ANYONE that badly... I sat there with my jaw on the floor–for those of you who don’t know what Cosmos DB is, it’s the first globally distributed, multi-model database service for building planet scale apps Started doing the evangelism already I see! This whole blog post is just a PR puff piece! That line is pretty much taken verbatim from the CosmosDB website - "planet scale apps" indeed. For those that were wondering what Developer Advocates do it's exactly this: write blog posts as if they're just engineers like you, but rave about how amazing their employers are. FWIW I even like Microsoft, Azure is my cloud of choice, but this kind of marketing activity is pretty condescending in my personal opinion. I like to keep things on a pure engineering level, technical merits only, warts and all.
- derhorizont 9y ago
  Specifically in reply to your messages, but also relevant to any others replying to you or not having done enough DA research: False. I can relate albeit not having that kind of attention, but had my current manager continually try to hire me for months and get me to interview (which I don't go out of my way saying either because it doesn't make sense to and I want others to think well of me because of my skills--which they often think higher of than I do myself) and she is much more knowledgeable and regarded in the community than me so I am not remotely surprised she was contacted so much and I know for fact that these daily calls DID happen--the ONLY reason she mentioned it was to explain why the process moved so quickly--not so she can go pat herself on the back because she is humble. Maybe you should go look her up on Twitter. She didn't amass a ton of followers for PR/marketing fluff. She's well known in the community due to the contributions she has made and has done a lot of great TECHNICAL things to help people learn e.g. https://github.com/ashleymcnamara/learn_to_code https://github.com/ashleymcnamara/learn_to_code Developer advocate is a widely used term and you can't assume a general definition. I am a developer advocate myself and part of my role is being a software engineer--I am in an engineering org, report to an engineering manager, and this means I code ON the project just like every other software engineer here, just not as my entire role. The difference is I also speak at conferences, make blogs/training material so that people in the community can learn more about how to use the product(s) (not market fluff). Whether it's coding on their team's project(s), coding on external open source software, or creating demo code, MANY developer advocates are partaking in the technical side themselves and they have to be very knowledgeable to be able to write the technical content in blogs independent of whether it's something they created or not. You realize this is a post about why she joined, not a general thoughts on the company or a technical overview, right? Therefore it will be the positive things. Also, it can't be just technical merits when you are deciding to join a company. It takes interesting topics and good engineering of course, but also great managers, great team members, a vision, what you'll be working on, etc. She wrote this to explain to people why she switched to Microsoft, not as anything to do with her job. I, and I am sure others, would appreciate it if you would please get off your high horse and go study up more on facts before you partake in condescending activity yourself by shitting on/slamming someone for something you haven't researched enough on. In this case it could include asking more of "what will you be doing?". And in general, it is best to avoid those types of things in general. Maybe give some technical feedback to posts instead with useful feedback/how to improve things and not dumping on it independent whether you agree with it or not. Also, go look at some talks/blogs etc from Developer Advocates (and similar titles like Technical Evangelist, Principal Technologist) in the community that include plenty of technical (vs marketing) content and help people learn such as: Francesc Campoy https://twitter.com/francesc https://twitter.com/francesc at Google https://github.com/campoy/go-tooling-workshop https://github.com/campoy/go-tooling-workshop Abby Fuller https://twitter.com/abbyfuller https://twitter.com/abbyfuller at Amazon Web Services https://github.com/abby-fuller/ecs-demo https://github.com/abby-fuller/ecs-demo Scott Hanselman https://twitter.com/shanselman https://twitter.com/shanselman at Microsoft https://www.hanselman.com/blog/ https://www.hanselman.com/blog/ Arun Gupta https://twitter.com/arungupta https://twitter.com/arungupta at Amazon Web Services Julia Ferraioli https://twitter.com/juliaferraioli https://twitter.com/juliaferraioli at Google (formerly a DA) http://blog.juliaferraioli.com/2015/11/containerized-minecraft-roulette.html http://blog.juliaferraioli.com/2015/11/containerized-minecra... Kelsey Hightower https://twitter.com/kelseyhightower https://twitter.com/kelseyhightower at Google https://github.com/kelseyhightower/kubernetes-the-hard-way https://github.com/kelseyhightower/kubernetes-the-hard-way And many others.
bmsleight_ 9y ago
TIL - Microsoft now uses git for the Windows code base. The blogs.msdn artcles linked by hackernoon was terrible, but hackernoon one line summary was good. Maybe there have changed ? Being able not to use windows at Microsoft is a surprise.
AJRF 9y ago
> ashleymcnamara Proud thinker. Avid creator. Devoted explorer. Incurable student. Humble Gopher. Principal Developer Advocate @Microsoft. Creator of gopherize.me "Principal Developer Advocate" I see

84 points by sharjeelsayed 9y ago

>The impact I’ll have at a company like Microsoft will be huge and at the end of the day, that’s what it’s about, right? Hmmm. Modest, not all over, but in spots.

sheraz 9y ago

The no-so-subtle cosmosDB pitch missed the real killer feature: mongodb compatibility And hipaa compliant. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/cosmos-db/mongodb-introduction https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/cosmos-db/mongodb-int... I'm not shilling just a happy azure user.

type0 9y ago

MS has gone full circle now and they are on "Embrace" stage now. Just wait for "Extend" and then it will be on "Extinguish" all over again.

mwerty 9y ago

Reminds me of http://www.fakesteve.net/2009/11/hell-hath-no-fury-like-a-borgocrat-scorned.html http://www.fakesteve.net/2009/11/hell-hath-no-fury-like-a-bo...

francesca 9y ago

Looks like this article was sponsored by MSFT.

vosper 9y ago

> Proud thinker. Avid creator. Devoted explorer. Incurable student. Humble Gopher. Principal Developer Advocate @Microsoft. TL;DR, she's really taking the advocacy thing seriously: apparently Microsoft is amazing (and there's a subtle digestion that Pivotal doesn't pay as well, and maybe isn't a interesting)

haskellandchill 9y ago
Pivotal doesn't pay well but it can be plenty interesting.

VengefulCynic 9y ago

“There is no loyalty in business, Ashley. You’re a single mom. You have a family and you owe it to them to see this Microsoft interview through.” A truth that is not repeated nearly often enough by employees.

toomuchtodo 9y ago
Indeed. Don't love your job because it isn't going to love you back.
- deathhand 9y ago
  I don't like this comment because individuals can "love working with you" and make sure that there is always a necessary flow of capital(if possible).
  - toomuchtodo 9y ago
    Feel free to not care for my comment. It comes from 15 years of work experience. I find that it holds true. Your mileage may vary. A job is a transaction; no more, no less. Treat it as such.
    - johnchristopher 9y ago
      Or self-fulfilling prophecy ? Sarcasm apart, mileage really does vary a lot and it depends on personality, colleagues, the industry, the company or the clients and other factors I can't think of. But these have to be considered nonetheless to sail the seas of work. I like your phrasing: "it's not going to love you back".
  - GuiA 9y ago
    I have loved working with certain people, that didn't protect them from being laid off by higher ups. What you're both saying isn't mutually exclusive. Your job isn't going to love you back - if a bunch of people get laid off and you're in that bunch, tough luck. But on the other hand, yes, you should do your best to be the kind of person your colleagues are excited to interact with.

atdt 9y ago

It turns out that Microsoft has the largest number of the top 500 Open Source projects for any one entity. Top 500 according to whom / what?

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
ddlutz 9y ago
I was curious about this myself, but it looks like they are the highest open source contributor on Github according to https://octoverse.github.com https://octoverse.github.com.
dankohn1 9y ago
In my measurement of the 30 highest velocity open source projects [0], Microsoft has VS Code, .NET and Office Developer. [0] https://www.cncf.io/blog/2017/06/05/30-highest-velocity-open-source-projects/ https://www.cncf.io/blog/2017/06/05/30-highest-velocity-open...
- pjmlp 9y ago
  A few Haskell and OCaml researchers are also on MSR payroll. They are also contribuing for Go on Windows and the main contributors for Go tooling on VSCode.

43224gg252 9y ago

"Because they hired me".

nickpsecurity 9y ago

Microsoft is such a huge corporation that it has many teams that act totally opposite one another. Being in or dealing with any one can blind you to what the overall company is like. It seems she's in one of the better groups. Personally, I've always loved Microsoft Research specifically since they do great stuff. Practical example: their driver, verification tool is the reason it doesn't blue screen so much anymore. They did another OS (VerveOS) proven safe down to assembly. Neat stuff. Then, there's the groups pushing garbage on enterprises with plenty of lock-in. Then, there's also what I read where the workers in many parts have a pretty stable job whose environment and structure works out better than usual for women, people with families, or just those wanting work/life balance Silicon Valley usually won't give them. The bigger tech companies often rate better than startups and such on those points. Overall, though, I think she's wrong about Microsoft changing. They're not. They have patents, copyrights, and data/protocol lock-in guaranteeing billions a year in profits for them. Changing would cost them much of that which will never happen. Far as open-source, they've gotten over a billion dollars off Android alone in patent royalties from their legal team despite doing everything they could to eliminate Android in favor of Windows Phone. Royalties not earned for sure. They did some Linux contributions to support running it on their own hypervisor pursuing more lock-in at other levels. Even many of the MS Research inventions are patented with who knows what risk. They continue to pay off politicians to make things worse for the rest of us like in U.S. w/ patent/copyright laws or Munich trying to uproot the FOSS conversion. They're the same, evil company that's trying to adjust to a FOSS-friendly world in a way that lets them suck money out of that too at everyone's expense. All that said, you can make an impact if you work at Microsoft on improving one of their huge, legacy products. Or even a new one with a high-chance of adoption. It might be a decent choice if aiming for the greater good. An easy example would be anything stopping code injection in Windows systems would be great in terms of damage prevented for that user and anyone their box DDOS'd. Reliability or integrity of data, too, as who wants to loose their most critical files at the worst time. Definitely good to be done even if they're evil. Just gotta determine if you want to do good for Microsoft's customers or improve things that will keep people away from them.

rdtsc 9y ago

> As a Developer Advocate, you’re spreading awareness and enabling developers to do what they love; write, code, and learn. Can someone explain that some more how that position is supposed to work. Maybe an example where DA made an impact for them personally. Otherwise that description sounds a bit like a rename of the traditional HR department.

ocdtrekkie 9y ago
I don't understand how you view Developer Advocates like HR. Developer Advocates work with external developers using and building on your platforms. Wholly different skill set, nothing to do with employee management.
- vxNsr 9y ago
  The confusion stems around the word "developer" OP is thinking of internal devs, while the role is actually about interfacing with outside devs who will be using/extending products and services the org makes. It's an easy mistake to make if you don't give it too much thought because there's no inherent explanation in "Developer Advocate" that would indicate we're talking about outside devs.
- rdtsc 9y ago
  > I don't understand how you view Developer Advocates like HR. Well I don't understand that's why I asked. But I see that just lead to down-votes and confusion. > Developer Advocates work with external developers using and building on your platforms. Ah! I thought they are advocating for internal developers. As in "management and other departments don't have developers' needs in mind but the person in this position does, and they serve as point of contact for help".
fenomas 9y ago
A developer advocate is someone who advocates the company's offerings to developers, and makes sure feedback from developers reaches internal teams. In practice this usually means going to a lot of dev conferences, making speeches, working with product management, making tutorials and sample apps, and stuff like that. So, borderline relationship with marketing, nothing at all to do with HR. Source: former developer evangelist.

0x8BADF00D 9y ago

I don't care how much Microsoft says they've changed. Much like I know Facebook will never change when its founder called users of his platform "dumb fucks".

bsaul 9y ago

ms still has a long way to go imho. i recently thought about developping my backend on fsharp with dotnet core, on a mac. Well, let me just say that the commitment of ms to some of their open source projects leave to be desired. documentation is painfully hard to find ( compare to apple or even java main web frameworks, where everything is neatly organized in one place), community is inexistant, the main "getting started" videos on youtube is obsolete ( project file format changed in the meantine)... And the only fsharp plugin for vscode is developped by a third company and requires mono to be installed, for some reason. Maybe it's just that nobody uses fsharp though. So then i tried to find some general architectural overview of asp.net core, and i didn't even know where to start looking. Ms documentation site is a maze, and you can only find short articles on very detailled subject, but nothing really top down. Now the reason for all that is of course that the MS users ecosystem is made of consulting companies selling "experts", and training companies selling training. Nobody there has any interest in good, free, online resources.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
oblio 9y ago
They truly have a long way to go, especially concerning awareness. But I feel that things will pick up once they release dotnet core 2.0, which will support dotnet standard 2.0, basically the equivalent to the Java base libraries. Up to now things were still in flux and nobody serious wanted to touch the stuff. Now they've mostly settled down.

RandyRanderson 9y ago

Tl;DR Is one of the reasons job security? I bet it isn't. 2014 18k jobs - https://www.wired.com/2014/07/microsoft-layoffs/ https://www.wired.com/2014/07/microsoft-layoffs/ 2015 8k layoffs - http://fortune.com/2015/07/08/microsoft-layoffs/ http://fortune.com/2015/07/08/microsoft-layoffs/ 2016 3k - http://fortune.com/2016/07/28/microsoft-layoffs-thousands-phone/ http://fortune.com/2016/07/28/microsoft-layoffs-thousands-ph... 2017 Q1 700 - http://www.businessinsider.com/about-700-microsoft-employees-to-be-laid-off-sources-say-2017-1 http://www.businessinsider.com/about-700-microsoft-employees... 2017 Q3 3k-5k https://techcrunch.com/2017/07/06/microsoft-confirms-layoff-reports-reorganization-expected-to-impact-thousands/ https://techcrunch.com/2017/07/06/microsoft-confirms-layoff-... It's hard to tell if the numbers overlap. For context MS has about 100k employees.

Markoff 9y ago
yeah and those are only direct employees, i worked for Microsoft vendor and we had ratio 1 Microsoft employee to 150 outsourced workers project on our site shrinked from 150-200 at peak to 25-30 in the end

gaius 9y ago

though I was getting daily emails from Microsoft recruiters Really? They were emailing every day? I call shenanigans, no-one wants to hire ANYONE that badly... I sat there with my jaw on the floor–for those of you who don’t know what Cosmos DB is, it’s the first globally distributed, multi-model database service for building planet scale apps Started doing the evangelism already I see! This whole blog post is just a PR puff piece! That line is pretty much taken verbatim from the CosmosDB website - "planet scale apps" indeed. For those that were wondering what Developer Advocates do it's exactly this: write blog posts as if they're just engineers like you, but rave about how amazing their employers are. FWIW I even like Microsoft, Azure is my cloud of choice, but this kind of marketing activity is pretty condescending in my personal opinion. I like to keep things on a pure engineering level, technical merits only, warts and all.

derhorizont 9y ago
Specifically in reply to your messages, but also relevant to any others replying to you or not having done enough DA research: False. I can relate albeit not having that kind of attention, but had my current manager continually try to hire me for months and get me to interview (which I don't go out of my way saying either because it doesn't make sense to and I want others to think well of me because of my skills--which they often think higher of than I do myself) and she is much more knowledgeable and regarded in the community than me so I am not remotely surprised she was contacted so much and I know for fact that these daily calls DID happen--the ONLY reason she mentioned it was to explain why the process moved so quickly--not so she can go pat herself on the back because she is humble. Maybe you should go look her up on Twitter. She didn't amass a ton of followers for PR/marketing fluff. She's well known in the community due to the contributions she has made and has done a lot of great TECHNICAL things to help people learn e.g. https://github.com/ashleymcnamara/learn_to_code https://github.com/ashleymcnamara/learn_to_code Developer advocate is a widely used term and you can't assume a general definition. I am a developer advocate myself and part of my role is being a software engineer--I am in an engineering org, report to an engineering manager, and this means I code ON the project just like every other software engineer here, just not as my entire role. The difference is I also speak at conferences, make blogs/training material so that people in the community can learn more about how to use the product(s) (not market fluff). Whether it's coding on their team's project(s), coding on external open source software, or creating demo code, MANY developer advocates are partaking in the technical side themselves and they have to be very knowledgeable to be able to write the technical content in blogs independent of whether it's something they created or not. You realize this is a post about why she joined, not a general thoughts on the company or a technical overview, right? Therefore it will be the positive things. Also, it can't be just technical merits when you are deciding to join a company. It takes interesting topics and good engineering of course, but also great managers, great team members, a vision, what you'll be working on, etc. She wrote this to explain to people why she switched to Microsoft, not as anything to do with her job. I, and I am sure others, would appreciate it if you would please get off your high horse and go study up more on facts before you partake in condescending activity yourself by shitting on/slamming someone for something you haven't researched enough on. In this case it could include asking more of "what will you be doing?". And in general, it is best to avoid those types of things in general. Maybe give some technical feedback to posts instead with useful feedback/how to improve things and not dumping on it independent whether you agree with it or not. Also, go look at some talks/blogs etc from Developer Advocates (and similar titles like Technical Evangelist, Principal Technologist) in the community that include plenty of technical (vs marketing) content and help people learn such as: Francesc Campoy https://twitter.com/francesc https://twitter.com/francesc at Google https://github.com/campoy/go-tooling-workshop https://github.com/campoy/go-tooling-workshop Abby Fuller https://twitter.com/abbyfuller https://twitter.com/abbyfuller at Amazon Web Services https://github.com/abby-fuller/ecs-demo https://github.com/abby-fuller/ecs-demo Scott Hanselman https://twitter.com/shanselman https://twitter.com/shanselman at Microsoft https://www.hanselman.com/blog/ https://www.hanselman.com/blog/ Arun Gupta https://twitter.com/arungupta https://twitter.com/arungupta at Amazon Web Services Julia Ferraioli https://twitter.com/juliaferraioli https://twitter.com/juliaferraioli at Google (formerly a DA) http://blog.juliaferraioli.com/2015/11/containerized-minecraft-roulette.html http://blog.juliaferraioli.com/2015/11/containerized-minecra... Kelsey Hightower https://twitter.com/kelseyhightower https://twitter.com/kelseyhightower at Google https://github.com/kelseyhightower/kubernetes-the-hard-way https://github.com/kelseyhightower/kubernetes-the-hard-way And many others.

bmsleight_ 9y ago

TIL - Microsoft now uses git for the Windows code base. The blogs.msdn artcles linked by hackernoon was terrible, but hackernoon one line summary was good. Maybe there have changed ? Being able not to use windows at Microsoft is a surprise.

AJRF 9y ago

> ashleymcnamara Proud thinker. Avid creator. Devoted explorer. Incurable student. Humble Gopher. Principal Developer Advocate @Microsoft. Creator of gopherize.me "Principal Developer Advocate" I see