5 ms·

Microsoft learned this lesson a long time ago. In the old days of MSFT, the saying was that BillG believed that everyone's manager needed to be a better coder t

by sriramk 16y ago

Microsoft learned this lesson a long time ago. In the old days of MSFT, the saying was that BillG believed that everyone's manager needed to be a better coder than him/her. The company learned eventually that the best engineers do not necessarily make the best managers and engineered the IC/manager split-career path that exists today. P.S I like how Google is finding out they're just the same as pretty much any other large organization :).

kragen 16y ago
It may be a coincidence that Microsoft was dramatically more successful in those old days than it eventually became.
- nostrademons 16y ago
  Microsoft is still dramatically successful today. The problem is that people perceive differences in success, not absolute numbers. So if you were wildly successful ten years ago and you're still wildly successful, what the hell have you been doing? Why haven't you improved? The problem Microsoft is facing is that they basically accomplished their mission statement. "A computer on every desk, all running Microsoft software." That is an accurate description of the world circa 2000. What the hell do they do now? Google is likely to face a similar problem in the next few years. "Organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful." For all the flack they're getting lately, they've done a remarkably good job at it. People expect to have whatever information they need at their fingertips, and they get mad when they don't. You wouldn't see the vitriol toward bad search results that you do now if the Internet was like it was in 1998, because nobody really had an expectation that they'd be able to find what they were looking for then.
  - Vic-nyc 16y ago
    I think you may be underestimating the potential reach of Google's ambitions in the search space. Think of improvements in search in specific areas of knowledge. How about searching for flights? Well, they bought ITA software for that, probably because they wanted to get into that space. How about organizing books? Right, Google Books? Scientific papers, law information. The extent that searches and organizing information in various disciplines is virtually limitless. Then there are things like the semantic web. I would go as far as saying that almost any kind of problem solving humans do involves a form of 'search', and as these processes take advantage of the ever increasing information on the web, they will benefit from improved search techniques. To conclude and restate again, Google's objectives, IMHO, are extremely far-reaching.
reeses 16y ago
Being there in the old days, I really liked two things. 1) Any question I had, someone could either give me the answer, direct me to the book (yeah, that long ago) that had the answer, or do the back and forth so I could figure out the answer with the knowledge I already had. 2) Rip the sh*t out of my code in a way that, while humiliating, made me a much better programmer. You went in thinking that you're the smartest kid in the room, but while I was there, the mean IQ was 132. It was a place with a bunch of smart _adults_ who also had a significant amount of knowledge and experience, and very few hoarders of that information. After all, how can you show how smart you are if you keep quiet when someone is wrong? My niches were that I had K&R memorized (that's really embarrassing now, but "actually, free(NULL) is legal," beats a full house) and my proof of concept client code made its way into SDKs. Joel Spolsky talks a lot about the same time era, basically Microsoft pre-Internet. Many of us ex-MSFTies idealize it to a certain degree, but that's fine–take and keep the good and drop the bad. Many of us are engineering leads/CTOs/flounders elsewhere, and the rigor present in the hierarchy of ability-to-execute helps to excel in other companies or industries. But most of us secretly would like to go back to a few thousand nerds in a rainy forest and hack products all day. :-)
- kragen 16y ago
  > but while I was there, the mean IQ was 132 Only 132? Are you serious? How did the IQ-105 people get hired, and what were they doing — opening envelopes in the mail room?
  - nostrademons 16y ago
    Mean IQ, so if we assume IQ is normally distributed and there're a few people with IQ > 170, that'd imply that the bulk of people have IQs in the 125-130 range. This seems eminently believable to me.
  - reeses 16y ago
    This was also the time when the legendary "Microsoft interview" started coming together. I.e., you'd have an all-day interview with everyone on your prospective team (if you were targeting a particular position), and each interviewer would have one or two IQ-test questions and at least one whiteboard coding exercise. People really went after the lateral-thinking questions and the estimation questions to find "smart" people. "How would you calculate how much rain falls in Washington in a day,"[1] "How many gas stations are there in (IYFStateOrCity)," and "How would you make a desk calendar with two cubes,"[2] were all fun ones. Now, by making your questions similar to those on IQ tests, you select people who tend to do well on IQ tests. Funny, that. [1] I got a boost on this one by spitting out,"weigh the clouds on their way in and out of the state," right away before building a slightly more feasible estimate. :-) [2] The trick is just like the Jimi Hendrix song, if six was nine.

by sriramk 16y ago

kragen 16y ago

It may be a coincidence that Microsoft was dramatically more successful in those old days than it eventually became.

nostrademons 16y ago
Microsoft is still dramatically successful today. The problem is that people perceive differences in success, not absolute numbers. So if you were wildly successful ten years ago and you're still wildly successful, what the hell have you been doing? Why haven't you improved? The problem Microsoft is facing is that they basically accomplished their mission statement. "A computer on every desk, all running Microsoft software." That is an accurate description of the world circa 2000. What the hell do they do now? Google is likely to face a similar problem in the next few years. "Organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful." For all the flack they're getting lately, they've done a remarkably good job at it. People expect to have whatever information they need at their fingertips, and they get mad when they don't. You wouldn't see the vitriol toward bad search results that you do now if the Internet was like it was in 1998, because nobody really had an expectation that they'd be able to find what they were looking for then.
- Vic-nyc 16y ago
  I think you may be underestimating the potential reach of Google's ambitions in the search space. Think of improvements in search in specific areas of knowledge. How about searching for flights? Well, they bought ITA software for that, probably because they wanted to get into that space. How about organizing books? Right, Google Books? Scientific papers, law information. The extent that searches and organizing information in various disciplines is virtually limitless. Then there are things like the semantic web. I would go as far as saying that almost any kind of problem solving humans do involves a form of 'search', and as these processes take advantage of the ever increasing information on the web, they will benefit from improved search techniques. To conclude and restate again, Google's objectives, IMHO, are extremely far-reaching.

reeses 16y ago

Being there in the old days, I really liked two things. 1) Any question I had, someone could either give me the answer, direct me to the book (yeah, that long ago) that had the answer, or do the back and forth so I could figure out the answer with the knowledge I already had. 2) Rip the sh*t out of my code in a way that, while humiliating, made me a much better programmer. You went in thinking that you're the smartest kid in the room, but while I was there, the mean IQ was 132. It was a place with a bunch of smart _adults_ who also had a significant amount of knowledge and experience, and very few hoarders of that information. After all, how can you show how smart you are if you keep quiet when someone is wrong? My niches were that I had K&R memorized (that's really embarrassing now, but "actually, free(NULL) is legal," beats a full house) and my proof of concept client code made its way into SDKs. Joel Spolsky talks a lot about the same time era, basically Microsoft pre-Internet. Many of us ex-MSFTies idealize it to a certain degree, but that's fine–take and keep the good and drop the bad. Many of us are engineering leads/CTOs/flounders elsewhere, and the rigor present in the hierarchy of ability-to-execute helps to excel in other companies or industries. But most of us secretly would like to go back to a few thousand nerds in a rainy forest and hack products all day. :-)

kragen 16y ago
> but while I was there, the mean IQ was 132 Only 132? Are you serious? How did the IQ-105 people get hired, and what were they doing — opening envelopes in the mail room?
- nostrademons 16y ago
  Mean IQ, so if we assume IQ is normally distributed and there're a few people with IQ > 170, that'd imply that the bulk of people have IQs in the 125-130 range. This seems eminently believable to me.
- reeses 16y ago
  This was also the time when the legendary "Microsoft interview" started coming together. I.e., you'd have an all-day interview with everyone on your prospective team (if you were targeting a particular position), and each interviewer would have one or two IQ-test questions and at least one whiteboard coding exercise. People really went after the lateral-thinking questions and the estimation questions to find "smart" people. "How would you calculate how much rain falls in Washington in a day,"[1] "How many gas stations are there in (IYFStateOrCity)," and "How would you make a desk calendar with two cubes,"[2] were all fun ones. Now, by making your questions similar to those on IQ tests, you select people who tend to do well on IQ tests. Funny, that. [1] I got a boost on this one by spitting out,"weigh the clouds on their way in and out of the state," right away before building a slightly more feasible estimate. :-) [2] The trick is just like the Jimi Hendrix song, if six was nine.