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When the first few lines tell me about how surprised I will be, I expected to hear that people are encouraged to be creative, take risks, try working on project

When the first few lines tell me about how surprised I will be, I expected to hear that people are encouraged to be creative, take risks, try working on project that might end up going nowhere -- in other words, that they promote a hacker culture. Unfortunately, the things that the author focused on are not inspiring. Being able to paint your office? Great, but how about week-long hackathons where people can code on whatever they want? Showing the three-level branch hierarchy of your repository doesn't seem to tell me a great story about what it's like to be a dev at MS. Not because there's anything wrong with the branch structure; if you work at a place where coders are given a lot of liberty and freedom, there should be more interesting things to talk about. EDIT: he has another post which talks more about culture and projects here: http://foredecker.wordpress.com/2011/02/27/working-at-microsoft20-time-and-prototypes/ http://foredecker.wordpress.com/2011/02/27/working-at-micros...

kenjackson 16y ago
I have heard that people at MS do something called "app week". This appears to be a week between milestones where you take a week to build something that can be built in a week. Usually just tangentially related to their product. Maybe this author can talk about that at some point.
- sriramk 16y ago
  Again very dependent on the team. I've been in teams which specifically carved out time for this and also been in teams where prototyping/building crazy stuff was something you did all the time.
- snprbob86 16y ago
  My team (XNA Game Studio) had App Week once or twice each year. By far my favorite time spent at Microsoft. The XNA team is full of ex-game developers because working on platforms at Microsoft has much better "work life balance" than game studios. The stuff that I, and the other team members, created were always cool/fun/hilarious/weird/etc. It was like a week long game jam ending with a Friday afternoon "Think and Drink" where everyone showed off their creations and talked about the good, the bad, and the ugly of our own technology through their App Week experiences.
kvdr 16y ago
>> Great, but how about week-long hackathons where people can code on whatever they want? Showing the three-level branch hierarchy of your repository doesn't seem to tell me a great story about what it's like to be a dev at MS. Not because there's anything wrong with the branch structure; if you work at a place where coders are given a lot of liberty and freedom, there should be more interesting things to talk about. I guess those can be counted as special cases and not pertaining to day-to-day working. The main point to gain from the post it seems is that its not a pain to work in such a complex environment. This is not some web or phone app, its a huge undertaking and how it works in a precise routine.

kenjackson 16y ago

I have heard that people at MS do something called "app week". This appears to be a week between milestones where you take a week to build something that can be built in a week. Usually just tangentially related to their product. Maybe this author can talk about that at some point.

sriramk 16y ago
Again very dependent on the team. I've been in teams which specifically carved out time for this and also been in teams where prototyping/building crazy stuff was something you did all the time.
snprbob86 16y ago
My team (XNA Game Studio) had App Week once or twice each year. By far my favorite time spent at Microsoft. The XNA team is full of ex-game developers because working on platforms at Microsoft has much better "work life balance" than game studios. The stuff that I, and the other team members, created were always cool/fun/hilarious/weird/etc. It was like a week long game jam ending with a Friday afternoon "Think and Drink" where everyone showed off their creations and talked about the good, the bad, and the ugly of our own technology through their App Week experiences.

kvdr 16y ago

>> Great, but how about week-long hackathons where people can code on whatever they want? Showing the three-level branch hierarchy of your repository doesn't seem to tell me a great story about what it's like to be a dev at MS. Not because there's anything wrong with the branch structure; if you work at a place where coders are given a lot of liberty and freedom, there should be more interesting things to talk about. I guess those can be counted as special cases and not pertaining to day-to-day working. The main point to gain from the post it seems is that its not a pain to work in such a complex environment. This is not some web or phone app, its a huge undertaking and how it works in a precise routine.