5 ms·

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...

by 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.
- cloudfierce 9y ago
  |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.| Oh but it's so easy for them to do that vs actual research. Thanks for your post above. Well said! I, too, am on a DA team reporting through an engineering organization. Old school vendors were known to have their DA teams report through to product marketing in the past (think Intel, HP, Microsoft, IBM) but that's all slowly changing. I interviewed at MSFT in 2014 and ultimately didn't take the role because I didn't want to report into a marketing org (& told them as much). I'm giving a few here the benefit of the doubt that maybe that's where the comments are stemming from? Older information? For the rest of the keyboard trolls: sorry that you hate your life so much that you have to expend energy in a negative way at people you don't know on the internet. It must suck feeling gross like that inside all the time.
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ensiferum 9y ago
Yup exactly. The contents of the article can be summed: "Look at me I'm so amazing that ppl want to recruit me daily! Look at Microsoft it's so amazing! Our tech is amazing! We're so amazing."
- gaius 9y ago
  In politics it's called astroturfing, i.e. fake grassroots.
onion2k 9y ago
Really? They were emailing every day? I call shenanigans, no-one wants to hire ANYONE that badly... It might just indicate that Microsoft's recruiters don't talk to each other.
qb45 9y ago
> CosmosDB Indeed, given projects like Google Spanner the stuff she wrote about CosmosDB doesn't really sound that jaw dropping. Devil is in the details, I suppose, but still no reason to make it sound as if global replication and high uptime were something unheard of. Also, regarding open source, I presume it's still Microsoft just publishing source code for some of their products but not really cooperating on their development with other parties that much or giving up total control over them? Though I wouldn't necessarily want to imply that she deliberately wrote it as a PR piece. Depending on her background (of which I know nothing), I suppose she could plead Hanlon's razor wrt to at least some paragraphs ;)
kodablah 9y ago
> This whole blog post is just a PR puff piece! Yup, as I read one part praising open source adjacent to another part praising a closed-sourced, single-cloud-vendor-only DB it became clear what this was.

by gaius 9y ago

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.

cloudfierce 9y ago
|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.| Oh but it's so easy for them to do that vs actual research. Thanks for your post above. Well said! I, too, am on a DA team reporting through an engineering organization. Old school vendors were known to have their DA teams report through to product marketing in the past (think Intel, HP, Microsoft, IBM) but that's all slowly changing. I interviewed at MSFT in 2014 and ultimately didn't take the role because I didn't want to report into a marketing org (& told them as much). I'm giving a few here the benefit of the doubt that maybe that's where the comments are stemming from? Older information? For the rest of the keyboard trolls: sorry that you hate your life so much that you have to expend energy in a negative way at people you don't know on the internet. It must suck feeling gross like that inside all the time.

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deleted 9y ago

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ensiferum 9y ago

Yup exactly. The contents of the article can be summed: "Look at me I'm so amazing that ppl want to recruit me daily! Look at Microsoft it's so amazing! Our tech is amazing! We're so amazing."

gaius 9y ago
In politics it's called astroturfing, i.e. fake grassroots.

onion2k 9y ago

Really? They were emailing every day? I call shenanigans, no-one wants to hire ANYONE that badly... It might just indicate that Microsoft's recruiters don't talk to each other.

qb45 9y ago

> CosmosDB Indeed, given projects like Google Spanner the stuff she wrote about CosmosDB doesn't really sound that jaw dropping. Devil is in the details, I suppose, but still no reason to make it sound as if global replication and high uptime were something unheard of. Also, regarding open source, I presume it's still Microsoft just publishing source code for some of their products but not really cooperating on their development with other parties that much or giving up total control over them? Though I wouldn't necessarily want to imply that she deliberately wrote it as a PR piece. Depending on her background (of which I know nothing), I suppose she could plead Hanlon's razor wrt to at least some paragraphs ;)

kodablah 9y ago

> This whole blog post is just a PR puff piece! Yup, as I read one part praising open source adjacent to another part praising a closed-sourced, single-cloud-vendor-only DB it became clear what this was.