4 ms·

> I'm looking forward to a Microsoft insider's exposé I interviewed there, soon after the acquisition, maybe nine months. Probably one of the most shocking exp

by bertil 8y ago

> I'm looking forward to a Microsoft insider's exposé I interviewed there, soon after the acquisition, maybe nine months. Probably one of the most shocking experiences in many aspects: they flew me from Europe, no one was ready to talk to me, or knew I was coming at all. I waited more than an hour, thought about leaving, hoping they wouldn’t mind paying for my hotel room and flight either way. Then someone who I recognised from their LinkedIn photo passed me, I said hi—they were surprised and thought the interview wasn’t happening. I had three interviews from people at most three months out of university (nothing but the same two brain-teasers); overall, the place seemed like completely lacking self-awareness. I had lunch with the only person with any experience, the UX researcher/ethnographer (six months out of post-doc) who was… way over everything. Chosen quotes: “Children running a daycare”, “the entitlement is staggering”, she was happy because that paid way better than academia and she could learn about private research, save money, go to meet-ups and interview. I liked the lunch because I had tried to make my joke during the interview, one about how Skype allows me to get three alerts about the birthday of a recruiter with whom I had an awkward 20-min chat six years ago (wink, wink: I care about users’ experience too). Blank stare from Chad. The UX researcher got it. It wasn’t funny, but at least I felt like I had pushed my bug report at the edge of my ability zone. I didn’t get a call-back. I was stranded for six months on an email chain with the recruitment coordinator who was only able to reimburse me with a paper check in dollars (I had bank accounts in four different currencies at that point but not dollars). I honestly think that I got so tired of it all that I just forgot… Or maybe I ended up cashing it at pennies on the dollar because my bank had pity on me. Anyway, a couple of years later, a new colleague at Facebook joins from there. The guy spent his first three months listing all the terrible, terrible things he saw there. Just new ways of being broken, every day over lunch, for a hundred days. I was impressed. That guy isn’t shy. Not sure he’s a great writer, but there was a lot to be learned there.

sonnyblarney 8y ago
This is disturbing. Satya, are you there?
- java-man 8y ago
  He is busy pushing code to overwrite users' font preferences and install multigigabyte updates...
cbzbc 8y ago
My experience was similar if somewhat more organised - multiple interviews over an extended period of time, before a trip to their office where no one seemed to realise I was there to be interviewed. I ended up having lunch with the HR person, who was fairly scathing about the whole thing. Got an offer - which looked fine, until I realised they had me down to work in another city despite all conversations being about working at the site and with the team closest to me.
snaky 8y ago
> Not sure he’s a great writer, but there was a lot to be learned there. Would you broadcast here some of the main points he made? Like what's the roots of the all that were.
- bertil 8y ago
  Honestly, nothing original, just the sheer amount of it was impressive: - technical debt “so high you could open a central bank” was my favourite quote: he gave implementation details, but it’s hard enough to grasp a working schema, a broken one is just confusing: no indices, bottlenecks everywhere, no monitoring… It was less the individual set-up than the successive obviously inappropriate solutions. Not “queries to this table are slow, let’s factor it, but without checking the query pattern”-bad, more “like let’s host it on a third party service, with incompatible technology, located on a different continent, and edit it 100 times more often” bad. - every executive decision was going the opposite direction of what anyone could possibly want; so much so that my concerns over usability felt like complaining about the shade of paint after a bomb went off; - lack of maturity of the team came up a lot; also how arrogant and absent the managers were; he mentioned someone in particular that had completely different architectural ideas every time you saw him. That particular rant has serious racist undertones. - the product was split in two, or a company was acquired, and they kept the worst code to impose it on others, or only work on the corporate offering… Honestly, I don’t know. It just felt unredeemable. I asked if I should actively try to work with people who had gone through this because of how much they learned or avoid anyone because they sounded not very self-aware. He clearly advertised for the later. He even said that he edited his own CV to hide that he was ever there. Last time I checked, he’s got a really vague “project at Microsoft as a contractor” there.
TallGuyShort 8y ago
Just a heads up that your interview quotes probably come with enough info to uniquely identify the person who was that open with you. Might want to return the favor with some anonymity...
- bertil 8y ago
  Good shout. I’m actually modified one irrelevant detail in my portrait to prevent that (I always do: it helps identify leaks-- a paranoid habit that I got from working with unreliable people). But then again, I’d be shocked if those had any consequences: she was probably gone under a month, both quotes were based on staggering observations as we were sitting there. The place acted like recess at a middle-school.

by bertil 8y ago

sonnyblarney 8y ago

This is disturbing. Satya, are you there?

java-man 8y ago
He is busy pushing code to overwrite users' font preferences and install multigigabyte updates...

cbzbc 8y ago

My experience was similar if somewhat more organised - multiple interviews over an extended period of time, before a trip to their office where no one seemed to realise I was there to be interviewed. I ended up having lunch with the HR person, who was fairly scathing about the whole thing. Got an offer - which looked fine, until I realised they had me down to work in another city despite all conversations being about working at the site and with the team closest to me.

snaky 8y ago

> Not sure he’s a great writer, but there was a lot to be learned there. Would you broadcast here some of the main points he made? Like what's the roots of the all that were.

bertil 8y ago
Honestly, nothing original, just the sheer amount of it was impressive: - technical debt “so high you could open a central bank” was my favourite quote: he gave implementation details, but it’s hard enough to grasp a working schema, a broken one is just confusing: no indices, bottlenecks everywhere, no monitoring… It was less the individual set-up than the successive obviously inappropriate solutions. Not “queries to this table are slow, let’s factor it, but without checking the query pattern”-bad, more “like let’s host it on a third party service, with incompatible technology, located on a different continent, and edit it 100 times more often” bad. - every executive decision was going the opposite direction of what anyone could possibly want; so much so that my concerns over usability felt like complaining about the shade of paint after a bomb went off; - lack of maturity of the team came up a lot; also how arrogant and absent the managers were; he mentioned someone in particular that had completely different architectural ideas every time you saw him. That particular rant has serious racist undertones. - the product was split in two, or a company was acquired, and they kept the worst code to impose it on others, or only work on the corporate offering… Honestly, I don’t know. It just felt unredeemable. I asked if I should actively try to work with people who had gone through this because of how much they learned or avoid anyone because they sounded not very self-aware. He clearly advertised for the later. He even said that he edited his own CV to hide that he was ever there. Last time I checked, he’s got a really vague “project at Microsoft as a contractor” there.

TallGuyShort 8y ago

Just a heads up that your interview quotes probably come with enough info to uniquely identify the person who was that open with you. Might want to return the favor with some anonymity...

bertil 8y ago
Good shout. I’m actually modified one irrelevant detail in my portrait to prevent that (I always do: it helps identify leaks-- a paranoid habit that I got from working with unreliable people). But then again, I’d be shocked if those had any consequences: she was probably gone under a month, both quotes were based on staggering observations as we were sitting there. The place acted like recess at a middle-school.