4 ms·
I don't know who Buchheit is, but Microsoft Research has employed three Turing Award winners (Tony Hoare, Butler Lampson and Chuck Thacker) for a decade or so.
by contextfree 16y ago
I don't know who Buchheit is, but Microsoft Research has employed three Turing Award winners (Tony Hoare, Butler Lampson and Chuck Thacker) for a decade or so. I doubt they'd have stayed if they felt mistreated.
In general I wouldn't put much stock in media anecdotes, as the media (or maybe just humanity in general, sadly) seems to love reinforcing preconceived narratives.
- beagle3 16y agoMicrosoft Research != Microsoft in general. It's not even 1% of Microsoft, and everywhere there is different. Some of the research there has practical use, but a lot of it is just PR for Microsoft.
- contextfree 16y agotrue, but that just shows how useless "would my mental caricature of celebrity figure x have been able to survive in my mental caricature of vast heterogeneous institution y?" is as an aid for anyone's understanding of the world. I could've pointed to Erik Meijer as an innovative rock star developer who appears to have done well in the MSFT environment, being largely responsible for the major additions to a shipping version of their flagship application framework. How much does that tell me about the internal MSFT culture as a whole? Not much, any more than this WSJ anecdote does.
- namekuseijin 16y agoMicrosoft Research is kinda like a country club for retired compsci laureates...