3 ms·

This article, like many others, seems to overestimate how large the actual numbers of developers is at Microsoft, as opposed to full teams with Test and mgmt an

This article, like many others, seems to overestimate how large the actual numbers of developers is at Microsoft, as opposed to full teams with Test and mgmt and their associated marketing, sales, etc. organizations. The .NET GC was roughly 1 person (sometimes a little less, sometimes a little more). Most of the base class libraries were one person. Even larger things, like the text editor, were usually a senior person and one or two very junior ones. And this is software that has to run on a not-at-all-fixed set of hardware platforms :-) In my time there, I never saw or heard anyone "think they can solve problems by throwing lots of people at them." Uniformly, the decisions made to get things shipped were to either cut the features that were the combination of the furthest behind and least value to the market or to pull over extremely senior talent that had already gotten their parts shipped. Of course, it was a big company, so YMMV. Can't speak for much more than dev tools, office, and windows.

refulgentis 16y ago
Not to be obtuse, or maybe miss the joke, but how can you sometimes have a little less than 1 person working on one of the most important parts of your runtime? Sounds like a bug more than a feature to me. :)
- Samuel_Michon 16y ago
  "Full-time equivalent (FTE) is a way to measure a worker's involvement in a project, or a student's enrollment at an educational institution. An FTE of 1.0 means that the person is equivalent to a full-time worker, while an FTE of 0.5 signals that the worker is only half-time. Typically, different scales are used to calibrate this number, depending on the type of institution (schools, industry, research) and scope of the report (personnel cost, productivity)." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Full-time_equivalent http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Full-time_equivalent
- Locke1689 16y ago
  It's a perfectly valid question, no need to downvote the guy.
- andreyf 16y ago
  how can you sometimes have a little less than 1 person working on one of the most important parts of your runtime? You make sure that person knows a lot about garbage collectors? If he's implemented garbage collectors before and is up-to-date on GC research, there's no reason one person couldn't implement it alone.
Locke1689 16y ago
I can honestly say that the Microsoft interview was the most difficult, draining 6 hours of my life. And that was for an internship -- basically interviewing to do a 3 month interview. I don't think anyone who's been on the inside would say Microsoft just "throws" developers at their problems.
- rantfoil 16y ago
  How Microsoft may interview candidates has no bearing on what they may direct them to do once hired.
  - cabalamat 16y ago
    I disagree. How a company interviews candidates affects which candidates get hired which over time has a big effect on corporate culture.
huhtenberg 16y ago
FWIW I heard a story of the "Find Dialog" (Ctrl-F) in Excel being written by a separate team of several people that included few developers, few testers, a project manager and a technical writer. It was in '94 and it was told by a guy who presumably left MS not long ago in the context of describing the benefits of the COM.
- lpgauth 16y ago
  I met someone that was project manager of the copy/paste functionality in Visio... edit: that was 2 years ago

refulgentis 16y ago

Not to be obtuse, or maybe miss the joke, but how can you sometimes have a little less than 1 person working on one of the most important parts of your runtime? Sounds like a bug more than a feature to me. :)

Samuel_Michon 16y ago
"Full-time equivalent (FTE) is a way to measure a worker's involvement in a project, or a student's enrollment at an educational institution. An FTE of 1.0 means that the person is equivalent to a full-time worker, while an FTE of 0.5 signals that the worker is only half-time. Typically, different scales are used to calibrate this number, depending on the type of institution (schools, industry, research) and scope of the report (personnel cost, productivity)." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Full-time_equivalent http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Full-time_equivalent
Locke1689 16y ago
It's a perfectly valid question, no need to downvote the guy.
andreyf 16y ago
how can you sometimes have a little less than 1 person working on one of the most important parts of your runtime? You make sure that person knows a lot about garbage collectors? If he's implemented garbage collectors before and is up-to-date on GC research, there's no reason one person couldn't implement it alone.

Locke1689 16y ago

I can honestly say that the Microsoft interview was the most difficult, draining 6 hours of my life. And that was for an internship -- basically interviewing to do a 3 month interview. I don't think anyone who's been on the inside would say Microsoft just "throws" developers at their problems.

rantfoil 16y ago
How Microsoft may interview candidates has no bearing on what they may direct them to do once hired.
- cabalamat 16y ago
  I disagree. How a company interviews candidates affects which candidates get hired which over time has a big effect on corporate culture.

huhtenberg 16y ago

FWIW I heard a story of the "Find Dialog" (Ctrl-F) in Excel being written by a separate team of several people that included few developers, few testers, a project manager and a technical writer. It was in '94 and it was told by a guy who presumably left MS not long ago in the context of describing the benefits of the COM.

lpgauth 16y ago
I met someone that was project manager of the copy/paste functionality in Visio... edit: that was 2 years ago