See nobody is disputing what all of us claim here. But it's the usual perception of majority of companies that engineering, product development,... are cost ce

See nobody is disputing what all of us claim here. But it's the usual perception of majority of companies that engineering, product development,... are cost centers and cost centers need to be minimized to gain profit. It's what you get when you let the beancounters run the business. But people bitching here that developers at MS don't have it well off - are being ignorant about majority of industry where developers are still being under-utilized to everyones dismay. And Microsoft's care of intellectual workers is top tier. Even the ones that are not well off (sitting in a room with 10 other people) are better off than 90% of our industry. Indeed some people get to have anything they want or need - good for them. Even better if it makes the end result better. It's good that they don't get into situation as I have in multiple occasions - running a top priority, code red development effort which if fails it will take the company down, and then when I needed a new virtual appliance I got informed that I cannot get is since the ESX is out of harddrives and that there will be no purchases since the budged has already been spent. And this is the industry standard - not the "I run bazillion node supercluster". Hell where I used to work - two of the interns went and bought 2 24" monitors each out of their own money to use them at work.