13 ms·

Bada Bing, Bada Boom: Culture inside Bing

245 points by xpaulbettsx 15y ago

dreamux 15y ago
Anyone have a link to the study referenced in here which says people prefer bing results to google's when logos are reversed? This seems like something MSFT's marketing department would be trumpeting at every opportunity... EDIT: The closest I've found is this - http://blindsearch.fejus.com/ http://blindsearch.fejus.com/ which lets users vote up anonymous result sets. However, the last reported numbers (from 2009) show Google in the lead. Oh well.
- kenjackson 15y ago
  I think they were internal studies, from the way it read in the article.
  - moultano 15y ago
    One thing I've always wondered is if every search company looks better than their competitors on their own metrics. Seems totally plausible given how many different ways there are to define metrics, and how different the types of queries that each search engine receives might be.
    - kenjackson 15y ago
      One interesting fact from their study though was that results returned with the Google logo was perceived as better, even if it came from Bing. This is unfortunately why marketing is such a big deal.
    - wanorris 15y ago
      Sometimes you know you're getting a beatdown and your metrics reflect it. Your goal is to simply close the distance over time. But one thing that happens is that if you decide a metric is important and make it a KPI, you are then trying to implement features based on their ability to "move the needle" on that KPI. So if you are effective at meeting goals, you tend to improve on that KPI (the one you are testing for improvement on) more than you do on some other metric that you are not measuring your performance against. So yes, if different competitors are using different metrics, they're likely to each perform the best on their own metrics.
jmillikin 15y ago
Independent of the post, does anybody else find the OCCASIONAL BOLD PHRASES very distracting? I can't make up my mind whether to READ THEM WITH EMHPASIS, as one might hear in verbal speech, or try to find a CLEVER HIDDEN MESSAGE from the author.
- canistr 15y ago
  When I saw Bada Bing, I thought there was going to be some Samsung/Microsoft partnership about to be announced.
  - wging 15y ago
    I'm imagining some China-centric Googler seeing "Baidu Bing" and chuckling.
- hubb 15y ago
  perhaps a little distracting, but all together it was very well-written
- thought_alarm 15y ago
  In my experience, that's how many Microsofties compose their email, to emphasize the important bits of a document that few readers will bother to fully read. And why not? What better way to take advantage of the MS-Word Rich Text Editor in Outlook than to bold random phrases.
- gfodor 15y ago
  It's Atwood-style, and I definitely find it really distracting. Every series of bold words is read by the voice in my head loudly and toneless, the way Americans yell English to foreigners.
  - blasdel 15y ago
    I'm pretty sure Atwood cribbed that wholesale from Jakob Nielsen's ancient advise: http://www.useit.com/papers/webwriting/ http://www.useit.com/papers/webwriting/ But Atwood is truly inane in his own special way: http://secretgeek.net/jatwood_how_to.asp http://secretgeek.net/jatwood_how_to.asp
Cherian_Abraham 15y ago
From the post: Yet the same people who led the 30-person MSN Search team retained key leadership positions in the 3,000-person Bing team. How, exactly, does this happen? I would say, more often than not when you work in large corporations where either teams have grown uncontrollably, or where certain people who happened to be present in key positions early, has enough clout organizationally to warrant the same position even when the team grows or its responsibilities grow. I have seen where consulting firms at Client organizations, where the Team Lead on the first client project who is managing three developers end up being the Program manager years later overseeing 40-50 consultants, with no real leadership experience.
- ralfd 15y ago
  But is this always bad? I think it can also shows an organic growth and managers/leads will grow with their responsibilities. The alternative is, that someone is working her ass off only to be replaced as a reward.
- hello_moto 15y ago
  Years later he manage 40-50 consultants. Looks like he's expanding his portfolio. What is wrong with that? :) Are you saying he can't scale? What is "leadership" experience anyway since most execs these days only care about money and more bonuses...Gone are the days of execs working for the company and mentoring his underlings. But then again, execs know the game as good as anybody else: board members will cut execs at any time they want in favour of bigger cut of the pie of the company's profit anyway.
mynameishere 15y ago
unless Google, like most of Microsoft’s previous competitors, summarily shoots itself via a series of disastrous decisions It's possible. Corporations change. The difference in quality is slight, but google has been making some ludicrous mistakes lately (IMHO, obviously): 1. Google instant. This is such shit I can hardly believe it. Yeah, I can turn it off, but the average person is going to be charmed by the gimmick of it without realizing how awful it is. On unfamiliar computers, I go to bing automatically. 2. The disinclusion of search terms. This happened all the time pre-google, and now it's happening at google with every query. You have to affix a plus sign on every term if you want it actually searched. Again, normal people are unaware. 3. The debasement of the brand. I'm talking about the non-stop cutesy-pie logos. What if Coke did this? 4. Very public flops outside their area of expertise. Google+, etc. ...these four things aren't going to hurt google too much, but they tell me that the lunatics are now in charge.
- andrewflnr 15y ago
  I don't particularly like Google Instant, but I'm curious why you hate it so much. How is it so awful?
  - xpaulbettsx 15y ago
    I personally find it awful in Chrome because they don't handle the autocomplete experience correctly, and I always end up searching for what they complete instead of what I wanted which happened to be a prefix of it.
    - deleo 15y ago
      Google instant is good for tablets/phones, not for desktop computers. Too bad they rolled it out to everybody I don't like it too much either, but can live with it.
  - cooldeal 15y ago
    I hate it because hitting backspace removes letters from the search field instead of going back in the browser even if I click outside the box. It gets too annoying. Not to mention that it's useless for me because I type really fast.
rachelbythebay 15y ago
I decided to do a test and switched my in-browser search bar to Bing. So far, I haven't had any reason to object. I still get results which do what I want. Also, I could swear that Bing Maps is actually faster than Google in terms of loading tiles, scrolling around, and all of that. Google Maps just sticks at times, for some reason. It's amazing to see it fall so far, considering that smooth-scrolling maps at Google is what brought me over from Mapquest years ago. I'd love to see someone continue the result comparisons with the brands filed off. It might surprise people.
- lordgilman 15y ago
  Someone did a blind test with Yahoo, Google and Bing two years ago. Here's one of the HN discussions over it. IIRC things got shut down a few days later because of trolls. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=646101 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=646101
  - hyperrail 15y ago
    No, no, it's still up: http://blindsearch.fejus.com/ http://blindsearch.fejus.com/
- jan_g 15y ago
  >Also, I could swear that Bing Maps is actually faster than Google in terms of loading tiles, scrolling around, and all of that I have to say that bing maps is pretty unusable for me. Maybe it's different for USA, but here in parts of Europe that I'm interested in it's useless. Slow and more or less unzoomable, for example this is my town: http://i.imgur.com/pGaeB.png http://i.imgur.com/pGaeB.png EDIT: maybe it's a browser(javascript?) problem, I'm not sure
rafaelferreira 15y ago
The post starts out sending a disgruntled-employee vibe, but it improves later on. The OP conjectures about how an organization becomes more heavily political than the rest of a company are pretty interesting.
sriramk 15y ago
For those who may not know Philip. I worked with Philip shortly back at MSFT. He was one of my favorite people and had all the right core values one would ever want. Someone who got stuff done and cared about it. I thought losing him to FB was a terrible loss for MSFT (he went on to do the FB/Skype integration almost single-handedly). He is not just another disgruntled employee, he is someone MSFT needs to listen to. No comment on the stuff on Bing. Or Yahoo :).
- michaelochurch 15y ago
  I don't think he's going to succeed at changing the culture he intends to criticize. The people who wage these stupid political wars don't care that people of conscience hate them. If anything, it energizes them to be hated by the decent among us. Something I found myself unprepared for is the bad-decision-as-an-assertion-of-power pattern. It literally was not until age 27 that I realized (despite seeing this behavior several times first-hand) how common it is, in business, for people in charge to make intentionally bad decisions for the sake of (a) asserting power, and (b) testing others' loyalty. I guess one could say I was too naive and hyper-rational to believe such a thing to be possible-- except in the movies. I wish I had a solution. For the record, people who say "Startups!" don't know what they're talking about. Startups can be great, but office politics can get just as ugly in small companies.
  - cpeterso 15y ago
    I have a friend who used to work at Apple. He jokes (I hope) that Steve Jobs pronounced (Mac OS X 10.2) "Jaguar" as jag-wire as a "prestige hypercorrection" to test the loyalty of his followers. If someone adopted his hypercorrected pronunciation, then he knows they are a sycophant. Though I'm not sure if that means the person should be trusted or ignored..
    - StrawberryFrog 15y ago
      Fun fact (possibly irrelevant, probably even true) an early example of that pattern is the river Thames that flows through London. It used to be pronounced like it's written, starting with a "Th". Then King George I took the throne in 1714. He was German, but from then onwards, the way that he said it (i.e. "Tems") was the right way. And still is. http://www.lbc.co.uk/why-is-the-river-thames-so-called-7258 http://www.lbc.co.uk/why-is-the-river-thames-so-called-7258 It says something about power that people still want to be treated like kings - whatever they do is automatically the right way for the courtiers and sycophants to copy. And it says something about Steve Jobs that he would play on that on purpose.
pcj 15y ago
Any insights on how this (sustaining a healthy and positive culture with growth) is handled in Google/Apple/even Facebook?
eric_boyd 15y ago
What an odd blog post! I've been on the Bing Ads side for the past two years. I overlapped with Philip very briefly at MSFT. When I started, he was working in a group that had nothing to do with Bing. I had a couple pretty positive email exchanges and generally thought highly of the guy, but certainly didn't know him well. Today, out of the blue, about a year after he left MSFT, he writes a scathing critique of a culture that he hasn't been a part of for 3+ years (I don't honestly know when he was at Bing), and writes about it in the present tense without any clarification that the events are in the past. On his Facebook post, Philip comments that the test director incident happened 5 years ago. His blog reads like it happened last week. Qi Lu joined MSFT less than 3 years ago to take over Bing and all of online services. When Qi took it on, it was called Live Search. It had been losing market share every month for years. Since Bing launched, it's market share has risen every month. It's quite possible that the culture Philip worked in was every bit as broken as he describes. But the team I work in, I can speak to it being a fantastic place to work now. Qi has been upgrading the talent top down and now I find it filled with very smart people making real progress, both in the quality of the search engine, and in the market share gains over the past two years. Are there still some political people? Of course, every large organization has them. But the company Philip writes about doesn't sound like the one I work in. Obvious disclaimer about the fact that I'm a current employee and thus biased.
- loboman 15y ago
  I think this deserves to go to the top
- prostoalex 15y ago
  "Though it’s been several years since I left, I still remember Bing as the time when I most despaired for Microsoft’s future." There's a slight hint that it has been several years since he left. It's not completely obvious, as it's hidden all the way in paragraph #1.
nostrademons 15y ago
Are there seriously 3000 people working on Bing?
- rbanffy 15y ago
  I think the point of the post was that there are about 2800 people on Bing who are playing political games while the remaining 200 work on a search engine.
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
ck2 15y ago
did you know that employees yodel at the end of their company meetings Sure hope that is voluntary or they have the Walmart management of the web. (google "walmart cheer")
foxit 15y ago
The question I have after reading this post is: What about his NDA? At a higher level, do they not demand signing of those? I certainly had one.
jonnathanson 15y ago
"People look out for themselves when there’s nothing to look forward to." This is what it all comes down to, whether at Bing, or at any other large organization. The other bullet points on Philip's list are fine, but this one is perhaps wholly sufficient. Politics exists in every organization. And every organization has some folks who are more Machiavellian than others. But all of this crap comes to the forefront, amplified and accelerated, when an organization is in turmoil. (And that atmosphere of turmoil usually trickles down from the top; a divisional leader who's always politicking and maneuvering inspires his lieutenants to do the same, and on and on it goes). I've had the distinct displeasure of working for at least three large divisions of megagiant companies in varying degrees of peril or stagnation, and all three of them -- despite wildly different corporate cultures and people -- became similar hotbeds of political intrigue. Declining quarterlies led to re-orgs, and re-orgs led to chaos, and chaos bred more chaos. And in this crucible people forged schemes, machinations, alliances, and double-crosses that would make A Game of Thrones look like a Dr. Seuss book. This phenomenon is notable because the same people, operating in the same groups, did not behave so politically in better times. Like I said, I'm sure that a few of them were always plotting and conniving. But only when the division went into steady decline did the sheep cast off their clothing and reveal the wolves beneath.
- hello_moto 15y ago
  It comes down to: survival instinct. On average people take irrational approaches while a small number of people would stay calm, stick with their integrity, and let time decides.
  - gaius 15y ago
    Easy to see this every day. Where I live, if the trains are running on time, everyone is perfectly polite, helps people with their luggage, always says "no, after you" and so on. When the trains are fucked, people become feral and climb over each other to get on, as no-one knows when the next one will come...
    - hello_moto 15y ago
hello_moto 15y ago
Programmers think that they hate politics but when it comes down to the actual technical stuff, they do politics as well. Some programmers want to be "relevant" in the HN sense so they push new technology that they just picked up last week religiously (node.js for a CRUD app, which most websites are anyway, comes to mind) like it is the next big thing. Or they just read 37Signals books and drank the 37Signals + RoR kool-aid and push 100% 37Signals mindset to the workplace that doesn't fit with that (different target, client base, market, etc). Come back in 3 years time and you'll see the same guy pushing for MVC in client-side/browser as opposed to stick with simplicity yet still pushing 37Signals mindset whenever he refused to do work that doesn't inline with him for whatever reasons (laziness, or else). Or perhaps they came back from Agile meeting and think that Scrum is the only way to run a project that everybody else must follow it. (Hint: Scrum is hard to understand and to apply to a large group of people who don't know Scrum 100%). On the flip side, cowboy coders hate a single addition of "process" even if that process is called Continuous Integration. They'll do whatever it takes to make sure they can continue to code like cowboys. Even the unit-test debate can be considered as politics. Some people want the company to rely on themselves so they prefer no unit-tests. Programmers are notorious with locking in the knowledge in their brain only hence no unit-tests, no documentations. Just Read The F... Code they say. C'mon, don't give me excuses that these are useless except for your weekend projects. We all know that most startups develop from prototypes. They almost rarely re-write their main (with odd codebase) products. ... more reasons to be an indie developer I suppose...
- rbanffy 15y ago
  When I am faced with colleagues like the ones you describe, I, as politely as possible, point out we have an HR problem. I have a good relationship with my HR people and I hope this kind of input goes somewhere. Truth is, the larger the organization, the lower the chances of hiring only the best people (and even the best can be corrupted by the bad apples). At some point, your average will approach society's median, which is pretty bad.
jroseattle 15y ago
I found Philip's article to be remarkably uninteresting. He observed political machinations in a large company -- what a shock! I don't care if he has been out of the space for 3 years, or if he's in the middle of it today -- he didn't identify anything about organizational behavior that isn't already known. Move along, nothing to see here....
parallel 15y ago
Apologies in advance for making a fairly trivial observation but I really like this guys use of bold in the text. It's a little like a tabloid newspaper but I found that it genuinely added to the writing making it more readable and more amusing.
bconway 15y ago
I once witnessed a debate between two leaders in Bing about whether Microsoft network proxies should be modified to redirect all employee traffic targeted at Google towards Bing instead. Never mind that employees were using Google; someone actually thought the way to win was to force them to use Bing. “I know, we’ll make them use it!” I love this mentality. With everyone else, it's dogfooding and is a highly recommended practice, especially here on HN. With Microsoft, it's forcing your employees to use something against their will.

245 points by xpaulbettsx 15y ago

Anyone have a link to the study referenced in here which says people prefer bing results to google's when logos are reversed? This seems like something MSFT's marketing department would be trumpeting at every opportunity... EDIT: The closest I've found is this - http://blindsearch.fejus.com/ http://blindsearch.fejus.com/ which lets users vote up anonymous result sets. However, the last reported numbers (from 2009) show Google in the lead. Oh well.

kenjackson 15y ago
I think they were internal studies, from the way it read in the article.
- moultano 15y ago
  One thing I've always wondered is if every search company looks better than their competitors on their own metrics. Seems totally plausible given how many different ways there are to define metrics, and how different the types of queries that each search engine receives might be.
  - kenjackson 15y ago
    One interesting fact from their study though was that results returned with the Google logo was perceived as better, even if it came from Bing. This is unfortunately why marketing is such a big deal.
  - wanorris 15y ago
    Sometimes you know you're getting a beatdown and your metrics reflect it. Your goal is to simply close the distance over time. But one thing that happens is that if you decide a metric is important and make it a KPI, you are then trying to implement features based on their ability to "move the needle" on that KPI. So if you are effective at meeting goals, you tend to improve on that KPI (the one you are testing for improvement on) more than you do on some other metric that you are not measuring your performance against. So yes, if different competitors are using different metrics, they're likely to each perform the best on their own metrics.

jmillikin 15y ago

Independent of the post, does anybody else find the OCCASIONAL BOLD PHRASES very distracting? I can't make up my mind whether to READ THEM WITH EMHPASIS, as one might hear in verbal speech, or try to find a CLEVER HIDDEN MESSAGE from the author.

canistr 15y ago
When I saw Bada Bing, I thought there was going to be some Samsung/Microsoft partnership about to be announced.
- wging 15y ago
  I'm imagining some China-centric Googler seeing "Baidu Bing" and chuckling.
hubb 15y ago
perhaps a little distracting, but all together it was very well-written
thought_alarm 15y ago
In my experience, that's how many Microsofties compose their email, to emphasize the important bits of a document that few readers will bother to fully read. And why not? What better way to take advantage of the MS-Word Rich Text Editor in Outlook than to bold random phrases.
gfodor 15y ago
It's Atwood-style, and I definitely find it really distracting. Every series of bold words is read by the voice in my head loudly and toneless, the way Americans yell English to foreigners.
- blasdel 15y ago
  I'm pretty sure Atwood cribbed that wholesale from Jakob Nielsen's ancient advise: http://www.useit.com/papers/webwriting/ http://www.useit.com/papers/webwriting/ But Atwood is truly inane in his own special way: http://secretgeek.net/jatwood_how_to.asp http://secretgeek.net/jatwood_how_to.asp

Cherian_Abraham 15y ago

From the post: Yet the same people who led the 30-person MSN Search team retained key leadership positions in the 3,000-person Bing team. How, exactly, does this happen? I would say, more often than not when you work in large corporations where either teams have grown uncontrollably, or where certain people who happened to be present in key positions early, has enough clout organizationally to warrant the same position even when the team grows or its responsibilities grow. I have seen where consulting firms at Client organizations, where the Team Lead on the first client project who is managing three developers end up being the Program manager years later overseeing 40-50 consultants, with no real leadership experience.

ralfd 15y ago
But is this always bad? I think it can also shows an organic growth and managers/leads will grow with their responsibilities. The alternative is, that someone is working her ass off only to be replaced as a reward.
hello_moto 15y ago
Years later he manage 40-50 consultants. Looks like he's expanding his portfolio. What is wrong with that? :) Are you saying he can't scale? What is "leadership" experience anyway since most execs these days only care about money and more bonuses...Gone are the days of execs working for the company and mentoring his underlings. But then again, execs know the game as good as anybody else: board members will cut execs at any time they want in favour of bigger cut of the pie of the company's profit anyway.

mynameishere 15y ago

unless Google, like most of Microsoft’s previous competitors, summarily shoots itself via a series of disastrous decisions It's possible. Corporations change. The difference in quality is slight, but google has been making some ludicrous mistakes lately (IMHO, obviously): 1. Google instant. This is such shit I can hardly believe it. Yeah, I can turn it off, but the average person is going to be charmed by the gimmick of it without realizing how awful it is. On unfamiliar computers, I go to bing automatically. 2. The disinclusion of search terms. This happened all the time pre-google, and now it's happening at google with every query. You have to affix a plus sign on every term if you want it actually searched. Again, normal people are unaware. 3. The debasement of the brand. I'm talking about the non-stop cutesy-pie logos. What if Coke did this? 4. Very public flops outside their area of expertise. Google+, etc. ...these four things aren't going to hurt google too much, but they tell me that the lunatics are now in charge.

andrewflnr 15y ago
I don't particularly like Google Instant, but I'm curious why you hate it so much. How is it so awful?
- xpaulbettsx 15y ago
  I personally find it awful in Chrome because they don't handle the autocomplete experience correctly, and I always end up searching for what they complete instead of what I wanted which happened to be a prefix of it.
  - deleo 15y ago
    Google instant is good for tablets/phones, not for desktop computers. Too bad they rolled it out to everybody I don't like it too much either, but can live with it.
- cooldeal 15y ago
  I hate it because hitting backspace removes letters from the search field instead of going back in the browser even if I click outside the box. It gets too annoying. Not to mention that it's useless for me because I type really fast.

rachelbythebay 15y ago

I decided to do a test and switched my in-browser search bar to Bing. So far, I haven't had any reason to object. I still get results which do what I want. Also, I could swear that Bing Maps is actually faster than Google in terms of loading tiles, scrolling around, and all of that. Google Maps just sticks at times, for some reason. It's amazing to see it fall so far, considering that smooth-scrolling maps at Google is what brought me over from Mapquest years ago. I'd love to see someone continue the result comparisons with the brands filed off. It might surprise people.

lordgilman 15y ago
Someone did a blind test with Yahoo, Google and Bing two years ago. Here's one of the HN discussions over it. IIRC things got shut down a few days later because of trolls. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=646101 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=646101
- hyperrail 15y ago
  No, no, it's still up: http://blindsearch.fejus.com/ http://blindsearch.fejus.com/
jan_g 15y ago
>Also, I could swear that Bing Maps is actually faster than Google in terms of loading tiles, scrolling around, and all of that I have to say that bing maps is pretty unusable for me. Maybe it's different for USA, but here in parts of Europe that I'm interested in it's useless. Slow and more or less unzoomable, for example this is my town: http://i.imgur.com/pGaeB.png http://i.imgur.com/pGaeB.png EDIT: maybe it's a browser(javascript?) problem, I'm not sure

rafaelferreira 15y ago

The post starts out sending a disgruntled-employee vibe, but it improves later on. The OP conjectures about how an organization becomes more heavily political than the rest of a company are pretty interesting.

sriramk 15y ago

For those who may not know Philip. I worked with Philip shortly back at MSFT. He was one of my favorite people and had all the right core values one would ever want. Someone who got stuff done and cared about it. I thought losing him to FB was a terrible loss for MSFT (he went on to do the FB/Skype integration almost single-handedly). He is not just another disgruntled employee, he is someone MSFT needs to listen to. No comment on the stuff on Bing. Or Yahoo :).

michaelochurch 15y ago
I don't think he's going to succeed at changing the culture he intends to criticize. The people who wage these stupid political wars don't care that people of conscience hate them. If anything, it energizes them to be hated by the decent among us. Something I found myself unprepared for is the bad-decision-as-an-assertion-of-power pattern. It literally was not until age 27 that I realized (despite seeing this behavior several times first-hand) how common it is, in business, for people in charge to make intentionally bad decisions for the sake of (a) asserting power, and (b) testing others' loyalty. I guess one could say I was too naive and hyper-rational to believe such a thing to be possible-- except in the movies. I wish I had a solution. For the record, people who say "Startups!" don't know what they're talking about. Startups can be great, but office politics can get just as ugly in small companies.
- cpeterso 15y ago
  I have a friend who used to work at Apple. He jokes (I hope) that Steve Jobs pronounced (Mac OS X 10.2) "Jaguar" as jag-wire as a "prestige hypercorrection" to test the loyalty of his followers. If someone adopted his hypercorrected pronunciation, then he knows they are a sycophant. Though I'm not sure if that means the person should be trusted or ignored..
  - StrawberryFrog 15y ago
    Fun fact (possibly irrelevant, probably even true) an early example of that pattern is the river Thames that flows through London. It used to be pronounced like it's written, starting with a "Th". Then King George I took the throne in 1714. He was German, but from then onwards, the way that he said it (i.e. "Tems") was the right way. And still is. http://www.lbc.co.uk/why-is-the-river-thames-so-called-7258 http://www.lbc.co.uk/why-is-the-river-thames-so-called-7258 It says something about power that people still want to be treated like kings - whatever they do is automatically the right way for the courtiers and sycophants to copy. And it says something about Steve Jobs that he would play on that on purpose.

pcj 15y ago

Any insights on how this (sustaining a healthy and positive culture with growth) is handled in Google/Apple/even Facebook?

eric_boyd 15y ago

What an odd blog post! I've been on the Bing Ads side for the past two years. I overlapped with Philip very briefly at MSFT. When I started, he was working in a group that had nothing to do with Bing. I had a couple pretty positive email exchanges and generally thought highly of the guy, but certainly didn't know him well. Today, out of the blue, about a year after he left MSFT, he writes a scathing critique of a culture that he hasn't been a part of for 3+ years (I don't honestly know when he was at Bing), and writes about it in the present tense without any clarification that the events are in the past. On his Facebook post, Philip comments that the test director incident happened 5 years ago. His blog reads like it happened last week. Qi Lu joined MSFT less than 3 years ago to take over Bing and all of online services. When Qi took it on, it was called Live Search. It had been losing market share every month for years. Since Bing launched, it's market share has risen every month. It's quite possible that the culture Philip worked in was every bit as broken as he describes. But the team I work in, I can speak to it being a fantastic place to work now. Qi has been upgrading the talent top down and now I find it filled with very smart people making real progress, both in the quality of the search engine, and in the market share gains over the past two years. Are there still some political people? Of course, every large organization has them. But the company Philip writes about doesn't sound like the one I work in. Obvious disclaimer about the fact that I'm a current employee and thus biased.

loboman 15y ago
I think this deserves to go to the top
prostoalex 15y ago
"Though it’s been several years since I left, I still remember Bing as the time when I most despaired for Microsoft’s future." There's a slight hint that it has been several years since he left. It's not completely obvious, as it's hidden all the way in paragraph #1.

nostrademons 15y ago

Are there seriously 3000 people working on Bing?

rbanffy 15y ago
I think the point of the post was that there are about 2800 people on Bing who are playing political games while the remaining 200 work on a search engine.

deleted 15y ago

[deleted]

ck2 15y ago

did you know that employees yodel at the end of their company meetings Sure hope that is voluntary or they have the Walmart management of the web. (google "walmart cheer")

foxit 15y ago

The question I have after reading this post is: What about his NDA? At a higher level, do they not demand signing of those? I certainly had one.

jonnathanson 15y ago

"People look out for themselves when there’s nothing to look forward to." This is what it all comes down to, whether at Bing, or at any other large organization. The other bullet points on Philip's list are fine, but this one is perhaps wholly sufficient. Politics exists in every organization. And every organization has some folks who are more Machiavellian than others. But all of this crap comes to the forefront, amplified and accelerated, when an organization is in turmoil. (And that atmosphere of turmoil usually trickles down from the top; a divisional leader who's always politicking and maneuvering inspires his lieutenants to do the same, and on and on it goes). I've had the distinct displeasure of working for at least three large divisions of megagiant companies in varying degrees of peril or stagnation, and all three of them -- despite wildly different corporate cultures and people -- became similar hotbeds of political intrigue. Declining quarterlies led to re-orgs, and re-orgs led to chaos, and chaos bred more chaos. And in this crucible people forged schemes, machinations, alliances, and double-crosses that would make A Game of Thrones look like a Dr. Seuss book. This phenomenon is notable because the same people, operating in the same groups, did not behave so politically in better times. Like I said, I'm sure that a few of them were always plotting and conniving. But only when the division went into steady decline did the sheep cast off their clothing and reveal the wolves beneath.

hello_moto 15y ago
It comes down to: survival instinct. On average people take irrational approaches while a small number of people would stay calm, stick with their integrity, and let time decides.
- gaius 15y ago
  Easy to see this every day. Where I live, if the trains are running on time, everyone is perfectly polite, helps people with their luggage, always says "no, after you" and so on. When the trains are fucked, people become feral and climb over each other to get on, as no-one knows when the next one will come...
  - hello_moto 15y ago

hello_moto 15y ago

Programmers think that they hate politics but when it comes down to the actual technical stuff, they do politics as well. Some programmers want to be "relevant" in the HN sense so they push new technology that they just picked up last week religiously (node.js for a CRUD app, which most websites are anyway, comes to mind) like it is the next big thing. Or they just read 37Signals books and drank the 37Signals + RoR kool-aid and push 100% 37Signals mindset to the workplace that doesn't fit with that (different target, client base, market, etc). Come back in 3 years time and you'll see the same guy pushing for MVC in client-side/browser as opposed to stick with simplicity yet still pushing 37Signals mindset whenever he refused to do work that doesn't inline with him for whatever reasons (laziness, or else). Or perhaps they came back from Agile meeting and think that Scrum is the only way to run a project that everybody else must follow it. (Hint: Scrum is hard to understand and to apply to a large group of people who don't know Scrum 100%). On the flip side, cowboy coders hate a single addition of "process" even if that process is called Continuous Integration. They'll do whatever it takes to make sure they can continue to code like cowboys. Even the unit-test debate can be considered as politics. Some people want the company to rely on themselves so they prefer no unit-tests. Programmers are notorious with locking in the knowledge in their brain only hence no unit-tests, no documentations. Just Read The F... Code they say. C'mon, don't give me excuses that these are useless except for your weekend projects. We all know that most startups develop from prototypes. They almost rarely re-write their main (with odd codebase) products. ... more reasons to be an indie developer I suppose...

rbanffy 15y ago
When I am faced with colleagues like the ones you describe, I, as politely as possible, point out we have an HR problem. I have a good relationship with my HR people and I hope this kind of input goes somewhere. Truth is, the larger the organization, the lower the chances of hiring only the best people (and even the best can be corrupted by the bad apples). At some point, your average will approach society's median, which is pretty bad.

jroseattle 15y ago

I found Philip's article to be remarkably uninteresting. He observed political machinations in a large company -- what a shock! I don't care if he has been out of the space for 3 years, or if he's in the middle of it today -- he didn't identify anything about organizational behavior that isn't already known. Move along, nothing to see here....

parallel 15y ago

Apologies in advance for making a fairly trivial observation but I really like this guys use of bold in the text. It's a little like a tabloid newspaper but I found that it genuinely added to the writing making it more readable and more amusing.

bconway 15y ago

I once witnessed a debate between two leaders in Bing about whether Microsoft network proxies should be modified to redirect all employee traffic targeted at Google towards Bing instead. Never mind that employees were using Google; someone actually thought the way to win was to force them to use Bing. “I know, we’ll make them use it!” I love this mentality. With everyone else, it's dogfooding and is a highly recommended practice, especially here on HN. With Microsoft, it's forcing your employees to use something against their will.