8 ms·

Resignation letter from Microsoft Employee

433 points by gavingmiller 16y ago

wccrawford 16y ago
I didn't read the whole thing... After I realized how stuck on himself he was, I just skimmed it. Do quirky people really brag about how quirky they are? Do they write essays and call them farewell letters? I've never yet met a fun person who goes around telling people how much fun they are.
- yurisagalov 16y ago
  I'm surprised that's what you took away from it. I thought they were good anecdotes about corporate culture and life at microsoft, as well as what we should aspire to, from someone who has seen a lot of people come and go. Each paragraph (and sometimes sentence?) stands fairly well on its own... Still, even if he's stuck on himself, it is _his_ farewell letter after all
- ximeng 16y ago
  I read the whole thing, and thought it was valuable. For example, little snippets like: "Turns out that there’s a strong correlation between a student’s grade and their assessment of the professor’s abilities." were new ideas to me. I guess some of this comes from the management and leadership books he's read. I didn't think he talks particularly much about himself or how quirky he is either. Also interesting that this is the second person at Microsoft I've read about this week complaining about benefits being reduced. Michael Kaplan (interesting blog on internationalization issues at Microsoft besides) says "Microsoft, multi-billion dollar company that it may be, has no spine whatsoever to speak of.": http://blogs.msdn.com/b/michkap/archive/2010/10/09/10073622.aspx http://blogs.msdn.com/b/michkap/archive/2010/10/09/10073622....
  - krupan 16y ago
    Same thing happened at HP with benefits. Accountants have no idea how demoralizing it is, they just multiply $0.50 * however many hundreds of thousands of cans of pop per month and assume it's a no brainer.
  - cjy 16y ago
    A while back I did a lit review on the correlation between grades and teacher evaluations. I remember being surprised at how little of a correlation economists found between the two variables. Based on my memory, things like teacher personality, teacher nationality, grade variance, and class size matter a lot. Didn't pg have an essay about how "Turns out" is a euphemism for I'm too lazy to provide evidence?
- deleted 16y ago
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- groaner 16y ago
  I've never yet met a fun person who goes around telling people how much fun they are. I must have read a different article then, since very little of what I read was actually about the author himself.
  - gamache 16y ago
    No, I think it's just that you read past the introduction.
- gaius 16y ago
  He lost me at the bit about it being impossible not to get promoted just by doing good work. Doesn't work that that in any organization, because to be a manager you have to want to be a manager, and you have to want it more than you want to be "just" a programmer, and you have to think being a manager is better than being a programmer. Getting a promotion is a full-time job in itself. No time left for coding...
  - strlen 16y ago
    There's ways to be promoted without being a manager. If that isn't the case in your organization (even if you _do_ want to be a manager), leave. Ideally, there should be two ladders: technical and management. Every management rank should have an equivalent technical rank, with salary to match (fellow being equivalent to a VP, CTO being equivalent to CEO). That's the case at Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Yahoo and many other technology companies (as opposed to enterprises that merely _use_ technology or sales/marketing companies masquerading as technology companies). Technical talent should be appreciated; at the mean time, being a manager is quite different from being an IC and requires a different skill-set -- one shouldn't become a manager only if they want a raise.
    - gaius 16y ago
      There're more than a few people where I work whose full time job seems to be inserting themselves into existing projects as middlemen for the purpose of taking credit. They're transparent too when it comes to taking blame... I don't want to be a manager (been there, done that) but if I did, I wouldn't have time to do actual work.
- aantix 16y ago
  >I've never yet met a fun person who goes around telling people how much fun they are. Hmmm, but I've met boring people who walk around complaining about how bored they are..
  - wccrawford 16y ago
    This is so very true. When I was young and said 'I'm bored', my mother used to say "There's no such thing as boredom, only boring people." A hard tactic, but ultimately got me to where I needed to be.
tertius 16y ago
Really needs a TL;DR
- city41 16y ago
  Does the "TL;DR" sentiment really belong at HN at all? I'd like to think this community is above that. The whole thrust of the site is about/for people who aren't interested in taking the easy way out.
  - marilyn 16y ago
    I always appreciate the efforts of HN'ers who post a TL;DR summary. It's less about taking the easy way out, and more about saving time.
    - raganwald 16y ago
      In that case, why is tertius asking for a summary? If a summary is a good idea, the keyboard can be found between tertius' chair and screen ;-)
  - Detrus 16y ago
    we just need an automated way to extract that information so it doesn't clutter the comments.
    - dctoedt 16y ago
      > we just need an automated way to extract that information Figure out that one and the world will beat a path to your door .... BTW, timing is everything, I guess - this was posted by justinweiss a couple of weeks ago as http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1733702 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1733702 (thank you Better HN extension for Google Chrome at http://goo.gl/PcMz http://goo.gl/PcMz).
- silvajoao 16y ago
  It was a sort of TL;DR of a 12 years career. Highly condensed wisdom.
jaredhansen 16y ago
This was the best thing I've read all week, full of nuggets of wisdom. Who cares whether he calls himself fun or quirky or whatever else? You could get about 80% of what you need to know about life and work from that one collection of paragraphs, which mean's it's pretty worthwhile read as far as I'm concerned.
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KirinDave 16y ago
It took all my discipline NOT to write an angry resignation letter. In the end, I didn't write any at all. No good can come from them unless they are the most vapid and empty of sentiments. Microsoft employees can be broadly classified in two current states of mind: people who can't wait to leave and people who can't imagine leaving. I almost never encountered someone that was in-between these extremes. As such, you pretty much can't write a resignation letter that expresses meaningful sentiment that doesn't offend one of these large groups.
xpaulbettsx 16y ago
I worked with Philip some, he's a really smart, interesting guy - I was definitely bummed when I heard he was leaving. His internal blog at MS had a lot of great advice for younger developers and managers, I managed to save it off before he left and the IT folks ate it
- js2 16y ago
  great advice for younger developers and managers ... the IT folks ate it IT, ever shortsighted.
- dreyfiz 16y ago
  Mind sharing?
skennedy 16y ago
Good ideas are a dime a dozen. Great ideas are usually laughed at. Neither sees the light of day without you taking action. While there were good stories and takeaways from his post, I keep hearing this same mantra coming across so many would-be entrepreneur stories. Why do people doubt themselves so much and not listen to their own ideas?
- keeptrying 16y ago
  I think working in a corporation kills that confidence in yourself. It numbs you somehow.
  - kenjackson 16y ago
    The issue isn't confidence, it's motivation. Ideas are a dime and dozen. Execution on good ideas is what matters. Personally, it seems so blidingly obvious that I wouldn't even think to say it, but clearly for a lot people this seems controversial.
pvg 16y ago
Two things struck me, one kind of minor - a Pentium 66? In 1997 my desktop machine at my new startup job was a Pentium Pro 200. It replaced the SGI Indy R4400 200 from my previous startup job. No offices with doors, though, of course. The other thing was, and I don't mean these questions in a derogatory way, how do you start working for Microsoft in 1997, of all years. And how do you stay there for 12 years running? What kind of startup employee will you be when the only professional environment you have known is Microsoft? I'm not suggesting that there aren't perfectly excellent, sensible answers to all of these, and obviously his new employer thinks so. I just can't personally conceive what they are.
- LargeWu 16y ago
  What kind of startup employee will you be when the only professional environment you have known is Microsoft? Good thing he's not going to a startup, he's going to Facebook.
  - pvg 16y ago
    Facebook, behemoth that it is, is still a startup. We get a little carried away calling every little personal website project a startup and perhaps that's just right for the forum. But don't get tunnel vision. Facebook is a startup.
    - codexon 16y ago
      Then how do we categorize a startup if not by age (Facebook is already 5 years old) and size (hundreds of employees, billions in stock)?
      - pvg 16y ago
        It is pretty arbitrary and Facebook is a late-stage startup but hundreds of employees, sky-high valuation and five years of age are not unheard of and still within 'startup' range, to me. Mushy factors include things like culture, innovation, risk. I'd say 'run by founder' also adds startup points.
raganwald 16y ago
Turns out that there’s a strong correlation between a student’s grade and their assessment of the professor’s abilities. Very interesting. I don’t listen too carefully when a poor performer tells me how awful their previous manager was. Wait, what? Are we confusing correlation with causation here? Let's say, for example, that a manager tends to give female employees poor ratings (or whatever BigCo calls a grade). Do we discount their negative assessment of the manager? If there's a poor relationship between an employee and a manager, I'm not surprised when there is negative performance and a negative assessment. Aren't we extremely interested in negative performers? We need to triage. Some employees are stars and will be stars no matter how you manage them. Ignore them, keep the kitchen stocked with whatever they drink. Some employees are poor performers no matter what you do. Identify them and fire them immediately, or better still leak their résumé to competitors, you get a 2-for-1. The area of management opportunity are the "swing performers," those whose performance can be influenced by management practice. Some of the negative performers will be irredeemable, but some will be swing performers and it's worth listening to disgruntled poor performers if you can find a way to filter for swing performers in the hope that you can identify opportunities to turn them into good performers.
- endtime 16y ago
  >Turns out that there’s a strong correlation between a student’s grade and their assessment of the professor’s abilities. One possible explanation is that the student's evaluation of the prof is based on how well he understands the course material (since the prof's job is to induce that understanding) - which, of course, also impacts the student's grade.
  - moonwalker 16y ago
    >Turns out that there’s a strong correlation between a student’s grade and their assessment of the professor’s abilities. In my experience with classmates, it initially might also look like this correlation is true, however I think the hypothesis is a bit more involved. In one case, one class was taught with quite easy grading policies and many people ended up getting good grades - yet the smart students were unhappy with the professor and lack of challenge. In another cases, I've seen quite difficult abstract math classes and smart students would complain about the teacher as well - because of personal incompatibility - the teacher's style just didn't click with the student. And also, many times weak students would express a lot of respect and positive rating of a professor even though the teaching was over the top of their heads. Yet obviously there were the lazy/less smart types who would just reduce the challenge to complaining about the prof - yet they are probably likely to complain about people in different situations (i.e. job)
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jonpaul 16y ago
He had me until: "What’s your final level at Microsoft? Please don’t say CEO or Technical Fellow – I can almost guarantee you it’s not." He may be right, but there are some ambitious employees at Microsoft who truly do want to be CEO. If that's what they want, I hope they continue to bust their ass of to achieve it. I really don't like when critics put a cap on someone's future.
- trickjarrett 16y ago
  Undoubtedly you are correct, someone else will eventually be CEO, thus his statement is categorically false. However he is being over the top to make a point, some people think it while knowing they don't work hard enough/care enough to get there. He is saying people need to stop lying to themselves and realistically view their future with the company.
- bld 16y ago
  I would think that people driven to attain those levels wouldn't listen to advice like that anyway.
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klbarry 16y ago
I very much enjoyed this, especially the part on compare with the best person in the office, no one else.
dkarl 16y ago
If you consistently deliver what the business needs most, and you do it well, it’s impossible not to get promoted. People tell me this isn’t true, that it’s all about the people you know and about “visibility.” I have no idea how to consistently deliver impactful business results without becoming visible as a side effect. I hate it when developers ask me how to become “more visible.” They hate it when I tell them to “do great work.” They think I’m mocking them. You can think this way if your idea of "what the business needs most" is "what currently has the sales guys in a tizzy." Forget about everything else. Oh, and if your code only works for current customers, and has to have a bunch of tweaks and fixes applied for each new customer, then people will think your code is what allows them to sell to new customers. No kidding. If you write code that doesn't handle cases A, B, and C, then later you get credit for adding "support" for A, B, and C and making it possible to sell to customers X, Y, and Z. That's "visibility," because people from sales and marketing will mention your name appreciatively at high levels. And for God's sake don't do any work on scaling or reliability, because a salesman never calls up your boss's boss and says, "It's been a long time since the scalability of your systems scotched a deal. I just want to say that's awesome and thank you." Wait until it breaks, make everyone thinks it's impossible, and then fix it. EDIT: In a healthy organization, none of this will affect who gets promoted, but in an organization where people worry about "visibility," this is what they're talking about.
- kenjackson 16y ago
  Unless you're at a non-profit, revenue/sales/profit are what drives the company. If you can duct tape a product that gets me $1B of yearly recurring revenue then I will take that over the cleanest architected product that no one wants to pay for. In one of my other comments from a different thread I made the point that a lot of developers don't realize that they should understand the business. When you do understand it and the salesperson is in a tizzy about the "wrong thing", you can point out, "actually, that's not the real revenue driver. XYZ is. Why does the customer think ABC is? I'll tell you why, it's because DEF. But by doing XYZ we can deliver ABC in six months time." I think you'll find when you can talk at the level of business a lot of things become clearer for you and the sales team.
  - 16y ago
kno 16y ago
Probably the longest resignation letter I’ve ever seen
- mcritz 16y ago
  One could call it “bloatware”.
VladRussian 16y ago
>I’ve managed almost 150 people across dev/test/PM. i stopped reading at this phrase. I was reading until it as i was genuinely curious how an engineer could write such BS.
- jmreid 16y ago
  I'd like to know what you think is BS about his letter.
maxharris 16y ago
Individuals are the sole cause of anything that’s ever happened. Exactly!
SkyMarshal 16y ago
"Practice articulating positions you disagree with faithfully and persuasively. Unless you can do this, you’re implicitly assuming that people who disagree with you are idiots. Smart people understand why smart people disagree." WTB more of this everywhere.
AlexC04 16y ago
Compared to the EA breakup letter the other day, this was a lot more fun to read. What a surprising change to read a resignation letter that wasn't all FU & drama.
8ren 16y ago
> Do you practice specific skills with repetition and intent? This troubles me a bit for coding, because: There need be no real danger of it ever becoming a drudge, for any processes that are quite mechanical may be turned over to the machine itself - Turing http://libreamoi.com/index.php/why-is-programming-repetitive-was-turing-wrong/ http://libreamoi.com/index.php/why-is-programming-repetitive... -- However... there surely are skills in this process itself. What are they, and can they be practiced? Concrete example: if you keep repeating code, you could (variously) write a function for it; a framework for it; a language macro; use an IDE that automates it; write a vim/emacs macro; etc So perhaps one specific skill is to learn how to automate things with a concrete tool, and practice automating tasks (eg. writing a few vim macros as practice, to learn the syntax, API, pitfalls, conventions etc). ( EDIT: or, more generally, practice using your tools ) Deeper skills are recognizing repetition (and regularity in general), defining it clearly enough to know what an automation would need to do; and know how to verify that you're correct. Implementing it is a final step. Another skill is in assessing whether such precise analysis is worth it, given insufficient data to 100% nail the task; that the task may change (esp with new data); and of course that to estimate how much effort is involved in doing it "properly", verses a "good enough" solution, verses not automating at all. But how does one practice those tasks with "repetition and intent"? They aren't like piano scales - each problem is unique and unknown. hmmm.
- jcl 16y ago
  There are a variety of problem-solving sites you can practice on, if that's the sort of thing you're looking for... http://codekata.pragprog.com/2007/01/code_kata_backg.html# http://codekata.pragprog.com/2007/01/code_kata_backg.html# http://projecteuler.net/ http://projecteuler.net/ http://www.spoj.pl/tutorials/ http://www.spoj.pl/tutorials/ http://programmingpraxis.com/ http://programmingpraxis.com/
iloveyouocean 16y ago
Meta-summary: Here is a list of platitudes which, if you completely internalize and act on them, will lead you to be successful enough to leave and get a job at Facebook.
- n8tron 16y ago
  As well as just about any other S&P500 company. There's some good knowledge in here.
sriramk 16y ago
I worked with Philip a bit last year. He's (well, was) probably one of my favorite MSFT employees - I don't think I've seen anyone else with such energy. Big loss for MSFT, great win for FB.
mayutana 16y ago
I thoroughly enjoyed reading it and the randomness ensured that every paragraph stands out on its own.
erikstarck 16y ago
...but trust me on the sunscreen.
markbnine 16y ago
Once, at a Pizza Hut counter, I noticed that all the pens meant for signing credit card receipts had little flowers attached to their tops. Stuck together in a cup, the bunch of pens looked like a bouquet. I asked the cashier whether this was a new Pizza Hut policy. She said no – she had done it on her own. What would you pay to have her in your company? Maybe he missed the point? People typically attach things to the end of pens to stop them from getting stolen. Not to make bouquets.
- talvisota 16y ago
  Every interpretation tells us something about the observer. This person interpreted the change as an improvement at the counter.
- mellery451 16y ago
  I wish the same thing would work for staplers...
euroclydon 16y ago
Having a hard time reconciling the dismissive attitude toward soda theft and the celebratory attitude toward punishment for cattle theft, otherwise awesome essay.
- deleted 16y ago
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Aegean 16y ago
I liked this because he explains really well on how employees may be misjudging a manager's negative attitude on them because they don't understand the requirements of the business (or productization, for that matter). It often happens that you need to do something negative such as giving bad review, not approving some large piece of code which the employee thinks is beautifully written. Or even just fire someone. I've been on both sides, and now on the management side I see that employees usually don't realize the truth, and consequently have hard time getting a lesson out of the incident.
edanm 16y ago
"Practice articulating positions you disagree with faithfully and persuasively. Unless you can do this, you’re implicitly assuming that people who disagree with you are idiots. Smart people understand why smart people disagree." This should be taught to everyone from a young age. "Individuals are the sole cause of anything that’s ever happened." The most inspiring quote in the article. Reminds me of the Margaret Mead quote I have hanging in my room somewhere: "Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed people can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has."
- stretchwithme 16y ago
  good stuff
herf 16y ago
Doesn't it show what's wrong with an organization when people's heads have this much politics and organizational complexity in them? His advice is to ship good software to get ahead, but his thought process is all about everything else.
kokor 16y ago
I can feel the iSheeps feeding in the dark.
resdirector 16y ago
"Use Occam’s Razor in interpersonal relations: look for the simplest, most straightforward explanation that assumes the best of everybody." Works in general, but not when you are dealing with an outlier.
devmonk 16y ago
It is hard to believe that someone that managed so many is focusing in his parting words on (1) telling people that got bad reviews that they aren't as good as they think they are, and (2) telling them to aim their sites lower (since not everyone can be president). That's not the kind of manager I'd want. There is nothing wrong with confidence and ambition; just redirect it towards taking risks to accomplish tasks that no one thought could be done. Those people complaining, btw, probably have valid complaints, regardless of what they've output. Often people that have low output are a sign of poor hiring and/or management. Why didn't he focus on suggesting changes to remedy this? In addition, he was ditching on the Litebulb mailing list, rather than suggesting an alternative. What if he were to suggest that MS had 20% time to work on Litebulb requests?
- jdp23 16y ago
  the attitudes in #1 and #2 are very typical of Microsoft managers
korch 16y ago
So this guy sounds like some office granny scolding the interns over trifles of etiquette. He summed up his 12 years of working at Microsoft with a bunch of smarmy anecdotes typical of office gossip & politics. Not a single mention about software or technology in general. No penetrating insights about the industry, products, the future. I wonder about Microsoft's financial future if this is what their corporate culture has been reduced to. Everyone is so high on themselves and on playing Soap Opera over in Redmond that nothing truly new gets shipped.
kokor 16y ago
"Fanboy article from a iSheep on HN"

433 points by gavingmiller 16y ago

I didn't read the whole thing... After I realized how stuck on himself he was, I just skimmed it. Do quirky people really brag about how quirky they are? Do they write essays and call them farewell letters? I've never yet met a fun person who goes around telling people how much fun they are.

yurisagalov 16y ago
I'm surprised that's what you took away from it. I thought they were good anecdotes about corporate culture and life at microsoft, as well as what we should aspire to, from someone who has seen a lot of people come and go. Each paragraph (and sometimes sentence?) stands fairly well on its own... Still, even if he's stuck on himself, it is _his_ farewell letter after all
ximeng 16y ago
I read the whole thing, and thought it was valuable. For example, little snippets like: "Turns out that there’s a strong correlation between a student’s grade and their assessment of the professor’s abilities." were new ideas to me. I guess some of this comes from the management and leadership books he's read. I didn't think he talks particularly much about himself or how quirky he is either. Also interesting that this is the second person at Microsoft I've read about this week complaining about benefits being reduced. Michael Kaplan (interesting blog on internationalization issues at Microsoft besides) says "Microsoft, multi-billion dollar company that it may be, has no spine whatsoever to speak of.": http://blogs.msdn.com/b/michkap/archive/2010/10/09/10073622.aspx http://blogs.msdn.com/b/michkap/archive/2010/10/09/10073622....
- krupan 16y ago
  Same thing happened at HP with benefits. Accountants have no idea how demoralizing it is, they just multiply $0.50 * however many hundreds of thousands of cans of pop per month and assume it's a no brainer.
- cjy 16y ago
  A while back I did a lit review on the correlation between grades and teacher evaluations. I remember being surprised at how little of a correlation economists found between the two variables. Based on my memory, things like teacher personality, teacher nationality, grade variance, and class size matter a lot. Didn't pg have an essay about how "Turns out" is a euphemism for I'm too lazy to provide evidence?
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groaner 16y ago
I've never yet met a fun person who goes around telling people how much fun they are. I must have read a different article then, since very little of what I read was actually about the author himself.
- gamache 16y ago
  No, I think it's just that you read past the introduction.
gaius 16y ago
He lost me at the bit about it being impossible not to get promoted just by doing good work. Doesn't work that that in any organization, because to be a manager you have to want to be a manager, and you have to want it more than you want to be "just" a programmer, and you have to think being a manager is better than being a programmer. Getting a promotion is a full-time job in itself. No time left for coding...
- strlen 16y ago
  There's ways to be promoted without being a manager. If that isn't the case in your organization (even if you _do_ want to be a manager), leave. Ideally, there should be two ladders: technical and management. Every management rank should have an equivalent technical rank, with salary to match (fellow being equivalent to a VP, CTO being equivalent to CEO). That's the case at Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Yahoo and many other technology companies (as opposed to enterprises that merely _use_ technology or sales/marketing companies masquerading as technology companies). Technical talent should be appreciated; at the mean time, being a manager is quite different from being an IC and requires a different skill-set -- one shouldn't become a manager only if they want a raise.
  - gaius 16y ago
    There're more than a few people where I work whose full time job seems to be inserting themselves into existing projects as middlemen for the purpose of taking credit. They're transparent too when it comes to taking blame... I don't want to be a manager (been there, done that) but if I did, I wouldn't have time to do actual work.
aantix 16y ago
>I've never yet met a fun person who goes around telling people how much fun they are. Hmmm, but I've met boring people who walk around complaining about how bored they are..
- wccrawford 16y ago
  This is so very true. When I was young and said 'I'm bored', my mother used to say "There's no such thing as boredom, only boring people." A hard tactic, but ultimately got me to where I needed to be.

tertius 16y ago

Really needs a TL;DR

city41 16y ago
Does the "TL;DR" sentiment really belong at HN at all? I'd like to think this community is above that. The whole thrust of the site is about/for people who aren't interested in taking the easy way out.
- marilyn 16y ago
  I always appreciate the efforts of HN'ers who post a TL;DR summary. It's less about taking the easy way out, and more about saving time.
  - raganwald 16y ago
    In that case, why is tertius asking for a summary? If a summary is a good idea, the keyboard can be found between tertius' chair and screen ;-)
- Detrus 16y ago
  we just need an automated way to extract that information so it doesn't clutter the comments.
  - dctoedt 16y ago
    > we just need an automated way to extract that information Figure out that one and the world will beat a path to your door .... BTW, timing is everything, I guess - this was posted by justinweiss a couple of weeks ago as http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1733702 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1733702 (thank you Better HN extension for Google Chrome at http://goo.gl/PcMz http://goo.gl/PcMz).
silvajoao 16y ago
It was a sort of TL;DR of a 12 years career. Highly condensed wisdom.

jaredhansen 16y ago

This was the best thing I've read all week, full of nuggets of wisdom. Who cares whether he calls himself fun or quirky or whatever else? You could get about 80% of what you need to know about life and work from that one collection of paragraphs, which mean's it's pretty worthwhile read as far as I'm concerned.

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KirinDave 16y ago

It took all my discipline NOT to write an angry resignation letter. In the end, I didn't write any at all. No good can come from them unless they are the most vapid and empty of sentiments. Microsoft employees can be broadly classified in two current states of mind: people who can't wait to leave and people who can't imagine leaving. I almost never encountered someone that was in-between these extremes. As such, you pretty much can't write a resignation letter that expresses meaningful sentiment that doesn't offend one of these large groups.

xpaulbettsx 16y ago

I worked with Philip some, he's a really smart, interesting guy - I was definitely bummed when I heard he was leaving. His internal blog at MS had a lot of great advice for younger developers and managers, I managed to save it off before he left and the IT folks ate it

js2 16y ago
great advice for younger developers and managers ... the IT folks ate it IT, ever shortsighted.
dreyfiz 16y ago
Mind sharing?

skennedy 16y ago

Good ideas are a dime a dozen. Great ideas are usually laughed at. Neither sees the light of day without you taking action. While there were good stories and takeaways from his post, I keep hearing this same mantra coming across so many would-be entrepreneur stories. Why do people doubt themselves so much and not listen to their own ideas?

keeptrying 16y ago
I think working in a corporation kills that confidence in yourself. It numbs you somehow.
- kenjackson 16y ago
  The issue isn't confidence, it's motivation. Ideas are a dime and dozen. Execution on good ideas is what matters. Personally, it seems so blidingly obvious that I wouldn't even think to say it, but clearly for a lot people this seems controversial.

pvg 16y ago

Two things struck me, one kind of minor - a Pentium 66? In 1997 my desktop machine at my new startup job was a Pentium Pro 200. It replaced the SGI Indy R4400 200 from my previous startup job. No offices with doors, though, of course. The other thing was, and I don't mean these questions in a derogatory way, how do you start working for Microsoft in 1997, of all years. And how do you stay there for 12 years running? What kind of startup employee will you be when the only professional environment you have known is Microsoft? I'm not suggesting that there aren't perfectly excellent, sensible answers to all of these, and obviously his new employer thinks so. I just can't personally conceive what they are.

LargeWu 16y ago
What kind of startup employee will you be when the only professional environment you have known is Microsoft? Good thing he's not going to a startup, he's going to Facebook.
- pvg 16y ago
  Facebook, behemoth that it is, is still a startup. We get a little carried away calling every little personal website project a startup and perhaps that's just right for the forum. But don't get tunnel vision. Facebook is a startup.
  - codexon 16y ago
    Then how do we categorize a startup if not by age (Facebook is already 5 years old) and size (hundreds of employees, billions in stock)?
    - pvg 16y ago
      It is pretty arbitrary and Facebook is a late-stage startup but hundreds of employees, sky-high valuation and five years of age are not unheard of and still within 'startup' range, to me. Mushy factors include things like culture, innovation, risk. I'd say 'run by founder' also adds startup points.

raganwald 16y ago

Turns out that there’s a strong correlation between a student’s grade and their assessment of the professor’s abilities. Very interesting. I don’t listen too carefully when a poor performer tells me how awful their previous manager was. Wait, what? Are we confusing correlation with causation here? Let's say, for example, that a manager tends to give female employees poor ratings (or whatever BigCo calls a grade). Do we discount their negative assessment of the manager? If there's a poor relationship between an employee and a manager, I'm not surprised when there is negative performance and a negative assessment. Aren't we extremely interested in negative performers? We need to triage. Some employees are stars and will be stars no matter how you manage them. Ignore them, keep the kitchen stocked with whatever they drink. Some employees are poor performers no matter what you do. Identify them and fire them immediately, or better still leak their résumé to competitors, you get a 2-for-1. The area of management opportunity are the "swing performers," those whose performance can be influenced by management practice. Some of the negative performers will be irredeemable, but some will be swing performers and it's worth listening to disgruntled poor performers if you can find a way to filter for swing performers in the hope that you can identify opportunities to turn them into good performers.

endtime 16y ago
>Turns out that there’s a strong correlation between a student’s grade and their assessment of the professor’s abilities. One possible explanation is that the student's evaluation of the prof is based on how well he understands the course material (since the prof's job is to induce that understanding) - which, of course, also impacts the student's grade.
- moonwalker 16y ago
  >Turns out that there’s a strong correlation between a student’s grade and their assessment of the professor’s abilities. In my experience with classmates, it initially might also look like this correlation is true, however I think the hypothesis is a bit more involved. In one case, one class was taught with quite easy grading policies and many people ended up getting good grades - yet the smart students were unhappy with the professor and lack of challenge. In another cases, I've seen quite difficult abstract math classes and smart students would complain about the teacher as well - because of personal incompatibility - the teacher's style just didn't click with the student. And also, many times weak students would express a lot of respect and positive rating of a professor even though the teaching was over the top of their heads. Yet obviously there were the lazy/less smart types who would just reduce the challenge to complaining about the prof - yet they are probably likely to complain about people in different situations (i.e. job)

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jonpaul 16y ago

He had me until: "What’s your final level at Microsoft? Please don’t say CEO or Technical Fellow – I can almost guarantee you it’s not." He may be right, but there are some ambitious employees at Microsoft who truly do want to be CEO. If that's what they want, I hope they continue to bust their ass of to achieve it. I really don't like when critics put a cap on someone's future.

trickjarrett 16y ago
Undoubtedly you are correct, someone else will eventually be CEO, thus his statement is categorically false. However he is being over the top to make a point, some people think it while knowing they don't work hard enough/care enough to get there. He is saying people need to stop lying to themselves and realistically view their future with the company.
bld 16y ago
I would think that people driven to attain those levels wouldn't listen to advice like that anyway.

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klbarry 16y ago

I very much enjoyed this, especially the part on compare with the best person in the office, no one else.

dkarl 16y ago

If you consistently deliver what the business needs most, and you do it well, it’s impossible not to get promoted. People tell me this isn’t true, that it’s all about the people you know and about “visibility.” I have no idea how to consistently deliver impactful business results without becoming visible as a side effect. I hate it when developers ask me how to become “more visible.” They hate it when I tell them to “do great work.” They think I’m mocking them. You can think this way if your idea of "what the business needs most" is "what currently has the sales guys in a tizzy." Forget about everything else. Oh, and if your code only works for current customers, and has to have a bunch of tweaks and fixes applied for each new customer, then people will think your code is what allows them to sell to new customers. No kidding. If you write code that doesn't handle cases A, B, and C, then later you get credit for adding "support" for A, B, and C and making it possible to sell to customers X, Y, and Z. That's "visibility," because people from sales and marketing will mention your name appreciatively at high levels. And for God's sake don't do any work on scaling or reliability, because a salesman never calls up your boss's boss and says, "It's been a long time since the scalability of your systems scotched a deal. I just want to say that's awesome and thank you." Wait until it breaks, make everyone thinks it's impossible, and then fix it. EDIT: In a healthy organization, none of this will affect who gets promoted, but in an organization where people worry about "visibility," this is what they're talking about.

kenjackson 16y ago
Unless you're at a non-profit, revenue/sales/profit are what drives the company. If you can duct tape a product that gets me $1B of yearly recurring revenue then I will take that over the cleanest architected product that no one wants to pay for. In one of my other comments from a different thread I made the point that a lot of developers don't realize that they should understand the business. When you do understand it and the salesperson is in a tizzy about the "wrong thing", you can point out, "actually, that's not the real revenue driver. XYZ is. Why does the customer think ABC is? I'll tell you why, it's because DEF. But by doing XYZ we can deliver ABC in six months time." I think you'll find when you can talk at the level of business a lot of things become clearer for you and the sales team.
- 16y ago

kno 16y ago

Probably the longest resignation letter I’ve ever seen

mcritz 16y ago
One could call it “bloatware”.

VladRussian 16y ago

>I’ve managed almost 150 people across dev/test/PM. i stopped reading at this phrase. I was reading until it as i was genuinely curious how an engineer could write such BS.

jmreid 16y ago
I'd like to know what you think is BS about his letter.

maxharris 16y ago

Individuals are the sole cause of anything that’s ever happened. Exactly!

SkyMarshal 16y ago

AlexC04 16y ago

Compared to the EA breakup letter the other day, this was a lot more fun to read. What a surprising change to read a resignation letter that wasn't all FU & drama.

8ren 16y ago

> Do you practice specific skills with repetition and intent? This troubles me a bit for coding, because: There need be no real danger of it ever becoming a drudge, for any processes that are quite mechanical may be turned over to the machine itself - Turing http://libreamoi.com/index.php/why-is-programming-repetitive-was-turing-wrong/ http://libreamoi.com/index.php/why-is-programming-repetitive... -- However... there surely are skills in this process itself. What are they, and can they be practiced? Concrete example: if you keep repeating code, you could (variously) write a function for it; a framework for it; a language macro; use an IDE that automates it; write a vim/emacs macro; etc So perhaps one specific skill is to learn how to automate things with a concrete tool, and practice automating tasks (eg. writing a few vim macros as practice, to learn the syntax, API, pitfalls, conventions etc). ( EDIT: or, more generally, practice using your tools ) Deeper skills are recognizing repetition (and regularity in general), defining it clearly enough to know what an automation would need to do; and know how to verify that you're correct. Implementing it is a final step. Another skill is in assessing whether such precise analysis is worth it, given insufficient data to 100% nail the task; that the task may change (esp with new data); and of course that to estimate how much effort is involved in doing it "properly", verses a "good enough" solution, verses not automating at all. But how does one practice those tasks with "repetition and intent"? They aren't like piano scales - each problem is unique and unknown. hmmm.

jcl 16y ago
There are a variety of problem-solving sites you can practice on, if that's the sort of thing you're looking for... http://codekata.pragprog.com/2007/01/code_kata_backg.html# http://codekata.pragprog.com/2007/01/code_kata_backg.html# http://projecteuler.net/ http://projecteuler.net/ http://www.spoj.pl/tutorials/ http://www.spoj.pl/tutorials/ http://programmingpraxis.com/ http://programmingpraxis.com/

iloveyouocean 16y ago

Meta-summary: Here is a list of platitudes which, if you completely internalize and act on them, will lead you to be successful enough to leave and get a job at Facebook.

n8tron 16y ago
As well as just about any other S&P500 company. There's some good knowledge in here.

sriramk 16y ago

I worked with Philip a bit last year. He's (well, was) probably one of my favorite MSFT employees - I don't think I've seen anyone else with such energy. Big loss for MSFT, great win for FB.

mayutana 16y ago

I thoroughly enjoyed reading it and the randomness ensured that every paragraph stands out on its own.

erikstarck 16y ago

...but trust me on the sunscreen.

markbnine 16y ago

Once, at a Pizza Hut counter, I noticed that all the pens meant for signing credit card receipts had little flowers attached to their tops. Stuck together in a cup, the bunch of pens looked like a bouquet. I asked the cashier whether this was a new Pizza Hut policy. She said no – she had done it on her own. What would you pay to have her in your company? Maybe he missed the point? People typically attach things to the end of pens to stop them from getting stolen. Not to make bouquets.

talvisota 16y ago
Every interpretation tells us something about the observer. This person interpreted the change as an improvement at the counter.
mellery451 16y ago
I wish the same thing would work for staplers...

euroclydon 16y ago

Having a hard time reconciling the dismissive attitude toward soda theft and the celebratory attitude toward punishment for cattle theft, otherwise awesome essay.

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Aegean 16y ago

I liked this because he explains really well on how employees may be misjudging a manager's negative attitude on them because they don't understand the requirements of the business (or productization, for that matter). It often happens that you need to do something negative such as giving bad review, not approving some large piece of code which the employee thinks is beautifully written. Or even just fire someone. I've been on both sides, and now on the management side I see that employees usually don't realize the truth, and consequently have hard time getting a lesson out of the incident.

edanm 16y ago

"Practice articulating positions you disagree with faithfully and persuasively. Unless you can do this, you’re implicitly assuming that people who disagree with you are idiots. Smart people understand why smart people disagree." This should be taught to everyone from a young age. "Individuals are the sole cause of anything that’s ever happened." The most inspiring quote in the article. Reminds me of the Margaret Mead quote I have hanging in my room somewhere: "Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed people can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has."

stretchwithme 16y ago
good stuff

herf 16y ago

Doesn't it show what's wrong with an organization when people's heads have this much politics and organizational complexity in them? His advice is to ship good software to get ahead, but his thought process is all about everything else.

kokor 16y ago

I can feel the iSheeps feeding in the dark.

resdirector 16y ago

"Use Occam’s Razor in interpersonal relations: look for the simplest, most straightforward explanation that assumes the best of everybody." Works in general, but not when you are dealing with an outlier.

devmonk 16y ago

It is hard to believe that someone that managed so many is focusing in his parting words on (1) telling people that got bad reviews that they aren't as good as they think they are, and (2) telling them to aim their sites lower (since not everyone can be president). That's not the kind of manager I'd want. There is nothing wrong with confidence and ambition; just redirect it towards taking risks to accomplish tasks that no one thought could be done. Those people complaining, btw, probably have valid complaints, regardless of what they've output. Often people that have low output are a sign of poor hiring and/or management. Why didn't he focus on suggesting changes to remedy this? In addition, he was ditching on the Litebulb mailing list, rather than suggesting an alternative. What if he were to suggest that MS had 20% time to work on Litebulb requests?

jdp23 16y ago
the attitudes in #1 and #2 are very typical of Microsoft managers

korch 16y ago

So this guy sounds like some office granny scolding the interns over trifles of etiquette. He summed up his 12 years of working at Microsoft with a bunch of smarmy anecdotes typical of office gossip & politics. Not a single mention about software or technology in general. No penetrating insights about the industry, products, the future. I wonder about Microsoft's financial future if this is what their corporate culture has been reduced to. Everyone is so high on themselves and on playing Soap Opera over in Redmond that nothing truly new gets shipped.

kokor 16y ago

"Fanboy article from a iSheep on HN"