17 ms·

In 8 months at Microsoft, I learned these things

• iknight 13y ago
  Welcome to the corporate world, where the grass isn't always greener on the other side. There is always being an intrapreneur. People are people and can be influenced. It isn't easy.
  • michaelochurch 13y ago
    There is always being an intrapreneur. No there is not, in most companies. In most firms, if you try to be an "intrapreneur" while the middle manager to whom you report has to deal with typical corporate dreck, you'll break this "Law of Power" (Never Outshine the Master): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WMy8Tf-zCag http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WMy8Tf-zCag Then you get fired for being "distracted" because the perception is that you care more about your career goals than your manager's. (Of course, this is usually true for most people and there's nothing wrong with that, but one can't be brazen about it.) There are benefits to working in larger companies, but the idea that one can just decide one day to recast his job description to "intrapreneur" is laughable for most people. The people who have jobs that would allow that (in small or large companies) don't need to fall back on some templated concept.
• mathattack 13y ago
  "I am surprised that no one I met in Windows Azure team heard about Heroku or Rackspace, which are direct competitors. That’s acceptable, not everybody has to know these." WOW! It's one thing to ignore competitors, it's another to not know who they are. I thought (by reputation) that Microsoft was a competitive place. "It’s hard to find a position in corporations matches what you love to do." Seems obvious, but hindsight is 20/20. It was a risk for them to post an article that could be considered critical of the mothership.
  • philliphaydon 13y ago
    I find that statement hard to believe. The Azure Insiders mailing list has multiple threads mentioning other competitors such as Heroku and Rackspace.
    • enraged_camel 13y ago
      I guess this once again proves that a lot of people simply don't read mailing list emails.
      • mathattack 13y ago
        :-) Everyone's inbox gets flooded. This highlights what people self-select to ignore.
    • fragmede 13y ago
      I don't. Microsoft has such a high level of not invented here (NIH) syndrome sometimes that I'd find it easier to believe that engineers on the ground are simply unaware of the competition.
      • philliphaydon 13y ago
        I'm not suggesting they should all know, but I don't believe all are completely oblivious to the outside world.
      • marssaxman 13y ago
        That was certainly my experience in devdiv. People barely seemed to realize that a world outside the Microsoft ecosystem still existed. I have forgotten the details, but there was a meeting once where I suggested we look at some open source project for ideas about solving the problem we were working on... possibly LLVM?... in any case the response was completely blank, like, what possible relevance could that have, why are you wasting your time thinking about some weird open source thing in the first place? It was a really strange attitude to encounter, as someone who had never even used Microsoft tools before going to work there.
  • shanselman 13y ago
    Ya, he's not paying attention. I work for Azure and everyone is very clearly aware of the world and the competition.
    • rajanikanthr 13y ago
      scott, hope he is not creating controversy by publicizing his team n stuff..
    • deleted 13y ago
      [deleted]
    • alpb 13y ago
      (Hi there, I'm the author.) Scott, you are a PM manager, you have to hear about it. What I am pointing out is individual contributors (SDEs and SDETs) mostly have never heard of these. Even the senior ones, I am pretty sure.
  • albertyw 13y ago
    My guess is this is because of the separation between engineers and product managers (PMs). Engineers are supposed to focus on development and PMs (and more businessy folks) are supposed to focus on the competition.
  • deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
  • adamconroy 13y ago
    An alternative explanation is that what he says is not true.
• fragmede 13y ago
  > Not giving back to the public domain is a norm. Uh, this is Microsoft, they may have a slightly more close-minded view of the open source movement than, say RedHat or Google, or hell, even Oracle.
  • yawgmoth 13y ago
    That isn't entirely true. While "giving back" may not be the norm, there are other relevant details to consider: http://arstechnica.com/business/2012/04/linux-kernel-in-2011-15-million-total-lines-of-code-and-microsoft-is-a-top-contributor/ http://arstechnica.com/business/2012/04/linux-kernel-in-2011... Legal departments also get in the way of contributions to open source. "We don't want any of our proprietary code to end up in that library" is a common theme found among legal teams that paint with too-broad of brushes. I am currently experiencing this.
    • smackfu 13y ago
      Not to mention someone suing you because you infringed on their software patents, with source code proof.
    • hamburglar 13y ago
      Not to mention Microsoft is terrified, and I mean terrified of any open source code accidentally getting copypasted into some Windows or Office. A team I worked on there had to indirectly use linux and there was literally one designated person who was allowed to have a linux machine, and the machine had to be set up by a contractor whose job it was to ensure it was scrubbed of any source code before being handed over to the one guy who was actually allowed to touch it. I swear, you could make the lawyers jump a mile by sneaking up behind them and whispering "GPL"
• vowelless 13y ago
  He sounds like someone who is significantly lowering his standards. Seems like working at a big corporation is killing his spirit and energy. That is just sad. Edit: Unless he is being sarcastic?
  • agilebyte 13y ago
    Yeah I think sarcastic but still wanting to keep the job for a while.
  • general_failure 13y ago
    I doubt he is sarcastic. The very fact that there is so much doubt means it is not sarcastic. Or it is exceptionally poor writing.
  • deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
  • brown9-2 13y ago
    It reads as sarcasm - "that is acceptable" meaning people in the group/team/culture accept it.
  • smackfu 13y ago
    His standards weren't based on the real world though.
    • nostrademons 13y ago
      The real world is an awfully broad place. There are plenty of places you can go where mediocrity is not encouraged, people do more than 2-3 hours of real work a day, they're passionate about their work and curious about outside developments, and your specialties do matter. If you want to work there and find that you're not able to do that in your current job, change your job. You tend to get the life you believe you deserve - if you're willing to put in the leg work to make it happen, you can very easily reconfigure the world around you to something you're satisfied with.
  • nabnob 13y ago
• addflip 13y ago
  Started a company... failed. Came crawling back to the corporate world, regretfully; it hasn't been all bad but I've experienced most of your pain points.
• joelhaasnoot 13y ago
  I work at a big enterprise and yes, lots of things are familiar. Then again, I work on a project that's about 5-8 years late, and migration will finally be completed next week. People are figuring out documentation matters, and large parts are being properly documented and/or rewritten. There are corporations where people get it.
• arasmussen 13y ago
  Ouch. > It is not what you do, it is what you sell. This bothers me. Multiple companies I've worked at have made me want to work on some sort of Code Quality team to go in and rip apart and rewrite entire sections of shitty code that won't make any immediate noticeable impact. The business impact it will make is next time another programmer has to touch that code it'll take them a tenth the time to understand, use, or extend it.
• Locke1689 13y ago
  Pretty much every single thing in here is false for my team. The first thing he should have learned about Microsoft: every team is almost completely separate.
  • jmduke 13y ago
    Not just Microsoft, any company that has a size greater than three digits. On average, at a big company, you're going to spend 95% of your time interacting with less than 1% of the employees.
    • nostrademons 13y ago
      I dunno. Numerically that seems right - Google has 30k+ employees, and I definitely spend 95% of my time interacting with less than 1% of them. But I've found that the breadth of interactions in that remaining 5% reaches across a wide expanse of the company. I work in Search Features. I have friends and professional contacts not just in Features, but also in Ranking, Maps, Glass, Google+, GFiber, Chrome, Android, AppEngine, YouTube, Research, Brain, CourseBuilder, Doodles, legal, and PR - not to mention a whole bunch of infrastructure teams and research projects that I can't tell you about. And I've found that one's effectiveness in a big company is to a large extent dependent upon the breadth of your internal professional network. The folks who seem to shoot up and don't get pigeonholed into just writing code for their manager are the ones who have a wide network and always seem to know somebody who can get this thorny task done.
• Danieru 13y ago
  I am doing an internship in Windows and I have to say his first few points are right on the dot. The windows debugger does have proper documentation. I know this because two separate people on opposite ends of Windows Org made a point to mention this. Yet the documentation itself is not more than one would expect from complex software's man page. This contrasts well with the software I am integrating with for one of my projects. The only mention I could find of said software was a slide saying "This software has no documentation, here is a link to .NET decompilation software". One surprise I can add is that Windows does not have an internal package management system. I expected to see a apt-get like tool. Instead there are various download.com like sites hosting installers.
  • gisenberg 13y ago
    If you're interested in package management solutions on Windows, you might want to see http://chocolatey.org http://chocolatey.org
  • EvanAnderson 13y ago
    Windows has a package management system (Windows Installer). It's crufty and quirky and gets abused (package files that are just wrappers around standalone installer programs, for example) but is generally pretty usable. I've always wished more Windows developers would use it.
  • seanmcdirmid 13y ago
    What about NuGet? It seems to work well enough.
  • alpb 13y ago
    Hey there, author of the post here. By "documentation" I mean docs for millions of lines of code written for the infrastructure running our systems internally and not shipped to public. These are dark areas that one can't easily find documentation in corporations, IMO.
• Kiro 13y ago
  This post is spot on and applies to more companies than you can imagine. Reading Hacker News gives you a really skewed view of how things work and how people think in the software business.
  • dk8996 13y ago
    I completely agree. Even late stage startup will begin to look more like what the blogger has described. The blogger should gain some exp and move on to a small/early stage startup or find a way to move in to R&D role within Microsoft -- these positions normally offer more freedom and greefields.
• venomsnake 13y ago
  Publishing something that HR/PR can consider slander under your real name while being junior developer is not a recipe for stable employment. These guys tend to freak out over minor stuff like that. Lets hope it does not have negative consequences. Otherwise familiar - these companies are like supertankers - move slowly and few people are empowered to make meaningful decisions and contributions. Worked for a few years in a telecom ... it was meetings, meetings, meetings, signing contracts with delivery dates before the day they we signed, absurd promises, turf war and NIMBY. From now on - 20-50 person companies for me only, unless I am at the very top.
  • ngoel36 13y ago
    I spent two summers interning as a Program Manager at Microsoft (Xbox and Office), and his statements are nearly 100% accurate: - Literally any piece of documentation was always 1+ years out of date. Setting up a dev environment could take days when it should have only taken hours. - A lot of my coworkers were over 35. Starkly different from my experience later at Google. Working past 6 was considered absurd, and a lot of people were perfectly happy just riding the Microsoft wave. There were plenty of engineers who had been at the company 12-18 years with only a single promotion or two. - I actually was able to do some open source work with Codeplex - Not a single person I worked with read HN or Reddit, that I knew of. It's a bit depressing reading the post, but at the end of the day Microsoft was and is still an amazing place to work. I was paid well, the engineers are well taken care of, and the consumer offerings are still fun and exciting. Although things were done differently than they are done in Silicon Valley, the difference is not necessarily bad, perhaps more eye-opening. This is how MOST computer science majors spend their careers. Not mastering MongoDB, collaborating on Google Spreadsheets, or posting things to HN, but using Windows XP, Visual Studio, and Microsoft Word 2003 on a 2008 Lenovo laptop. And MS is perfectly happy taking their money.
    • jmduke 13y ago
      Although things were done differently than they are done in Silicon Valley, the difference is not necessarily bad, perhaps more eye-opening. This is how MOST computer science majors spend their careers. Not mastering MongoDB, collaborating on Google Spreadsheets, or posting things to HN, but using Windows XP, Visual Studio, and Microsoft Word 2003 on a 2008 Lenovo laptop. And MS is perfectly happy taking their money. I think this is a dangerous line of logic that leads to equating 'new' with 'important.' I think once you get to the point where you judge someone for the tools they use or the sites they browse you go down a pretty negative path. It's shockingly easy to forget how much of the world runs on J2EE and ASP.net.
• Kerrick 13y ago
  Duplicate: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5868066 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5868066
• jedanbik 13y ago
  I wish I could say things were better on the academic end of scientific computing. Expect no documentation in corporations. --> Expect no documentation in research code. It is not what you do, it is what you sell. --> It is not what you do, it is what you publish. Not everybody is passionate for engineering. --> It is not what you do, it is what you publish. 2-3 hours of coding a day is great. --> It is not what you do, it is what you publish. Not giving back to the public domain is a norm. --> Not giving back to the public domain is a norm because you might not own your data, or because you might not have any documentation. The world outside is not known here a lot. --> Ivory towers? It is all about getting shit done. --> It is all about getting shit published. Copy-pasting code can be okay. --> Copy-pasting code is okay. Code reviews can be skipped. --> Code reviews? You're lucky if we keep track of revisions. Your specialties usually do not matter. --> You are your specialty. At the end, you are working for your manager’s and their managers’ paychecks. --> At the end, you are working for your advisor and your advisors’ grants.
  • deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
  • sidww2 13y ago
    To be fair, the job of the academia is to do research. Coding is just a means to an end. If on the other hand, you're distributing your code or it's intended as an ongoing project, then good comments and architecture are important (Disclaimer: I'm a PhD student).
    • gohrt 13y ago
      The job of the engineer is to ship products, not code. (Unless you sell code or maybe library-components) See, it's easy to ship responsibility on either side, with the exact same line of reasoning.
      • sidww2 13y ago
        Usually though that product code will be worked on by many other people. The same is often not true of academic projects.
• papercruncher 13y ago
  I spent 5 years at Microsoft as a dev and share almost none of the author's sentiments. I had very few meetings, my manager went out of his way to make sure that I was not blocked, code reviews were mandatory, blogging on technical aspects was ok, had ample free time to work on any side project I wanted (even encouraged to work with MSR on things that were more researchy), etc etc... I could go on for a while. Sure, there was a huge emphasis on shipping rather than spending days space architecting the codebase and sure, not every piece of code was a stellar example that would show up in a college textbook but I'm having the exact same problems while doing my own startup, where at times I knowingly incur some technical debt in order to ship on time.
  • albertyw 13y ago
    Out of curiosity, which division were you in? Given the size of Microsoft, I'm not surprised there would be some major differences between different teams.
    • ngoel36 13y ago
      He said Azure.
  • snth 13y ago
    How long ago? Do you think it was different when you were there, that it was better in your group specifically, or that it's better in most other groups?
    • papercruncher 13y ago
      I was in Online Services (aka Windows Live) about two years ago. Some groups are obviously better than others, that can be said for any company. I think the problem here is that the author does not realize that unlike college, corporate world requires you to be a bit more proactive. Large companies may suffer from bureaucracy but on the upside, they have vast resources and smart/accomplished people you can tap into if you check your ego at the door, don't expect everything handed to you in a silver platter and tone down the poisonous attitude.
• orclev 13y ago
  I can't decide if this post is a joke or not. Yes a lot of what he describes goes on in many large corporations (although rarely ALL of what he describes unless you're one of the unfortunates stuck at one of the REALLY dysfunctional companies), but the way this article is written makes it sound like you should expect and be satisfied with all the things he describes. If the company you work for suffers from about half of what he describes that's probably about "average" for the industry, but that just means you've got a mediocre job. If your company checks 3/4 or more of that list, your company sucks, look for something better. If your company exhibits none, or only a couple of the problems, that's a pretty good company, consider yourself lucky (although try to fix the problems if you can). Just because something is dysfunctional in the company you work for doesn't mean you should just accept it, you should try to change it if you can, but depending on how far down the totem pole you are you probably won't be able to make that big a difference. In general, the better the company you work for, the more likely you'll be able to fix what problems there are. If a company is so dysfunctional that there's no hope for change, start looking for something better, don't put up with a horrible working environment just because the company is "big" or well known.
• yekko 13y ago
  I wonder if he's been to one of those back stabbing Microsoft Performance Reviews yet, probably not since he's only there 8 months.
• poxrud 13y ago
  Thank you for posting. I think you will inspire a lot of younger devs to seek more meaningful employment than working for big corp. However I fear that you will lose your job over this post.
• xradionut 13y ago
  I understand his experience. I've been mainly, (70% of the time), a third party Windows developer and admin for the last two decades and have spent thousands of hours working with and talking to Microsoft folks. Even have a few family members that work for the corporation. NIH: Many Remondites live in the "bubble" where technology from the outside doesn't exist or doesn't matter. (It reminds me of the hard core Republican base.) This extends to much of the user base as well. There is a strong denial of OSS and there used to be taunting of Apple. (Until the iPhone kicked the smartphone market in gear.) Future: Redmond has some serious issues to deal with: dysfunctional management, growing OSS usage, rejection of Win8/Xbox One and how to get people to use Azure when it's known you are the NSA's bitch.
  • twoodfin 13y ago
    (It reminds me of the hard core Republican base.) hn works better without this kind of snark. I'm sure the "hard core Democratic base" believes most of what they read on the Daily Kos, too. Almost everyone has a bubble around something in their lives.
• mckilljoy 13y ago
  As others are saying, Microsoft is a very large company with a great deal of variance in the quality and maturity of teams. I wouldn't consider this description representative. Azure is still a comparably new team, so I'm not surprised if it is still sorting out its processes. I've hear similar descriptions of Bing teams, and other "startup" divisions in the company. But there are definitely some brutally effective teams there that far outshine any other non-Microsoft team I've ever seen.
• thehme 13y ago
  Good luck. I hope this was not a mistake to publish, but it is definitely true of ALL jobs, not just developers or tech in general. I have noticed that it usually has to do with people being greedy of their knowledge and wanting to be indispensable. However, many of us have a choice to contribute to this and other places where we can share info as you said in your post, so thanks.
  • marssaxman 13y ago
    It is fortunately not true of all software jobs; if it were, I would have changed careers a very long time ago. Perhaps I have been lucky, but my experiences in small companies have generally been much, much better than what the author describes.
    • thehme 13y ago
      You know, you are right about that. I think that you are right about there being some small companies that are very good and some developers that are excellent at documenting code, sharing knowledge, etc. All software dev companies should probably require Code Complete as regular reading and sharing info should be encouraged as well.
• marssaxman 13y ago
  Those are good things to learn. All of them correspond to my own experiences in large companies; none of them are specific to Microsoft. He is fortunate to discover this early, with what sounds like a fairly minimal degree of trauma, so that he can either learn to deal with it or learn to avoid such environments. I'll never work for such a company again, that's for sure! Been through it three times and that's enough to be certain.
• thirsday 13y ago
  All those things that he wrapped up with "and that's ok." How exactly are they ok?
  • rajanikanthr 13y ago
    ultimately one needs paycheck.. Its not easy to switch to the ultimate company which is perfect according to his ideologies when you have wife/kids..
• groby_b 13y ago
  I can't comment on MS, but I can certainly tell you that not all large companies work that way. Some points just don't apply - I happen to be lucky enough that I do work with passionate engineers, manage to get about 5 hours of coding done, and actually look at reasonably decent documentation. And some things are as they should be. Your "specialty" rarely matters that early in your career. Most of the things mentioned (create iOS app, know MongoDB, etc.) are things that I'd expect a good developer to pick up as needed. Working as a software engineer is about being able to think logically, not mastering a particular subset of skills. And yes, latest software is frowned upon. You'll know why once you've been on a project that went completely off the rails right before finish just because somebody needed to upgrade the compiler. Those are things you plan for. You test the new software extensively, and see when you can best absorb the inevitable cost of switching.
• matthiasb 13y ago
  "Expect no documentation in corporations" TechNet has so many valuable articles! It helps me every day to figure out the issues I have without having to hire an expert;-) And I love the Microsoft Test Lab Guides (http://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/1262.test-lab-guides.aspx http://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/1...) which is continuously updated.
  • smackfu 13y ago
    I think it's just internal vs. external documentation. People are paid to write external docs as their job, so they should be pretty good.
• weland 13y ago
  This is one of the things that has always bugged me. I've had my share of work in a-large-company-i-shall-not-name. In my experience, given higher tiers that are receptive enough (read: people with technical backgrounds and some technical experience -- not necessarily glorious, even some QBASIC hacking is ok) and team members that are not mediocre, this stuff can be helped. Even in large companies. Not in all departments, not in all teams, but it can be different -- although the technical challenges involved in doing it "right" are insignificant compared to the non-technical ones. Most of it seems to stem from the fact that, while large companies are very eager to enforce non-technical compliance (sometimes to unhealthy extremes, where they value conformance over performance), technical discipline is not as eagerly enforced. The same people who, in virtue of their hunger for promotion, would ship anything that compiles and seems to work, will tolerate any amount of crap. If enough team leaders, product managers, department heads and, in general, enough people who are not directly responsible for code they write, regularly contribute mediocre technical solutions, no one will ever get sanctioned for mediocrity, just for outright failure. That being said, I would personally fire any manager responsible for the following: > Expect no documentation in corporations. I have seen the knowledge inside the company is mostly transferred by talking and hands-on sessions. If this happens, things are fucked up beyond recovery. If a company can afford to budget weeks and weeks of paperpushing for approving the first draft of the approval form for the architecture, they can afford extra time for proper documentation. When this happens, it's often a symptom of middle management wanking it until the upper management begins thrusting the hierarchical cock down their ass, and then immediately raining all responsibility down on the technical layers, which cannot rain it on anything else. I can't claim that the teams I worked in had brilliant, completely up-to-date documentation, but it was good enough that newcomers had to begin pouring questions only when they actually struck tough code for the first time. In exchange for that, we treated blatantly missing or out-of-date documentation like any other bug -- we had timeframes for fixing it and people who were being paid to do it. I never had anyone from the upper layers ever complain about it. They were reluctant at first, but then, when the new employees who were handed over to our team were up to their necks in code after two weeks, whereas their equally recently-hired colleagues were still attending training sessions, no one had any chance of unhappiness anymore. > 2-3 hours of coding a day is great. 2-3 hours of coding a day, for everyone in the team, every day of the week, is something the team leader should be strangled for. Slowly. In several stages. Just before moving to the micromanagement-obsessed higher layers. Non-technical/upper-management hated me for it, but every Monday I screamed, yelled and kicked and any necessary, but unproductive bullshit they had for us was scheduled either on Monday, or on Friday. Technical meetings were always scheduled at least one day in advance (well, whenever possible, but it rarely wasn't). At the end of the week, one day was definitely wasted, but I made it a goal that we get at least one day a week when we can do nothing but code. If the people who like meetings can get a day -- fuck, can get every day of the week -- when they can have meetings from the first hour of work to the last hour of overtime, coders deserve a day where they can do nothing but code. Yes, it results in people hating you. It also results in them not being able to do squat about it. > The world outside is not known here a lot. [...] It’s not common here. I am surprised that no one I met in Windows Azure team heard about Heroku or Rackspace, which are direct competitors. That’s acceptable, not everybody has to know these. This is very, very, very wrong, it's wrong beyond words. Not having heard about the competition -- especially in such a trendy thing -- is a symptom of your people not being familiar with the technology they develop. Not cool. Someone in Recruiting had to meet a recruitment quota. You can't make racing games with people who don't know there are other racing games beyond those they develop, and they most certainly cannot be creative if what everyone else calls "reinventing the wheel" is "new development" to them. That isn't to say everyone has to have a perfect picture about the competition, their strong points and weak points and so on. That's what the Marketing and Sales folks are paid for. But a lot of things, from motivating people to exploring new features, is difficult -- hell, if you ask me, it's impossible -- if they don't have a full picture of the field they play on. It's like fielding a football team and asking them to play against an unknown team, blindfolded. > It is all about getting shit done in corporations. [...] As long as that functionality is ready, it is okay and can always be fixed later. Windows Azure is just three years old IIRC. Let them bask in their Getting Things Done attitude for another ten years. Either their developers will get their shit together, or three quarters of the team will be interns, new employees who have no idea what they got themselves into, people who just couldn't be made to fit anywhere else but the company is afraid to fire over crackpots' lawsuits and a horde of business majors to run the project. Don't get me wrong -- both the approaches I outlined and the ones presented in the article can be equally lucrative under the right management, and the supply of teachers' pets eager to climb the corporate ladder will always be drawn towards the fiery chasm of companies like Microsoft. Hell, even smart and brave folks will do it, thinking they will be able to take it an fit in, will try it -- I've done it myself, twice even (in true experimental science way). But the one this guy talks about tends to drive away most of the smart, dedicated, creative people. You can run a corporation on corporate drones, but your market leader position will constantly be usurped by technical shortcomings, even among brilliant products, and constantly be saved only by savvy business tactics. Profitable (even in the long term), but sorrily futile in the greater picture of things.
• KennyCason 13y ago
  At least from my experience, corporations had very good documentation and where I worked we always had constant peer/code reviews. Also if you worked 2-3 hours likely you'd be overrun with work. It's hard to argue with some of the other points, like "It is all about getting shit done," though I'm inclined to say that that point is universal to most companies.
• tnuc 13y ago
  >At the end, you are working for your manager’s and their managers’ paychecks. You are working to get the shareholders a better share price and dividend payout.
  • marshray 13y ago
    I'm working to climb Maslow's hierarchy and achieve self-actualization. If managers and stockholders benefit from that, that's cool with me.
• QEDturtles 13y ago
  It speaks volumes that even the M$ engineers are afraid of new versions of M$ software...
• slacka 13y ago
  > Expect no documentation in corporations. I've worked with enough small to large companies, to feel confident saying that if the culture does not value and encourage documentation, then you shouldn't plan on staying. Back in the day we made do with SMB/NFS shares, but with todays wikis, SharePoint, and google docs, there is no excuse. From internal APIs docs, VPN setups, build env. setup, POs, to expense reports, you shouldn't have to find the right person. Any company < 2 years should be in the process of developing this stuff, and any company older should either have it or you should be looking for a new job.
• pasbesoin 13y ago
  Yep.
• chudi 13y ago
  I had the same feeling entering my first job, and I think that its not something about Microsoft it seems to me that its the clash between what we tough that was work, what were taught that was work in college and what it is work in the real world. Nevertheless these points are valid and we all know the problems of this stuff.
• m4tthumphrey 13y ago
  Most of these rang true for me and I only work in a 25 personal company. The biggest one is everyone except me is only there for the 9-5 and the paycheck. Not one has heard of HN. This is why I start a new job in 2 weeks.
• thinkersilver 13y ago
  Each time is different. You really should take this down or wait to change teams after a year and a bit or leave. It sounds like there is serious disconnect between your expectations and the company culture and what you have written does not reflect too well on the Azure team.
• cromwellian 13y ago
  Obviously, these things exist a long a continuum. For example, at Google, people do tend to write design docs, maybe because writing and sharing them are so easy with Google Docs and Google Sites. We also write lots of "Getting Started" docs, so a new team member can check out code and know how to get his project up and running quickly. How to commit and test changes. How production works. Privacy, Security, Logging, and Monitoring related docs. Source Code documentation seems better than most companies I've worked at, and Code Reviews are not skipped. The source control system won't allow you (without overrides) to commit without review and approval for most projects. We also don't like committing hacks just to get something to work. It is generally understood that a //TODO -- will clean up later, or promise to do so will almost never actually be cleaned up later. Rushing creates technical debt. Not saying it doesn't happen, but the degree to which people commit something they know to be wrong just for expediency is low. This certainly affects agility. All of the burdens of docs, reviews, testing, et al do slow down iteration, but I've also been slowed down by hacky code at other companies. It's a trade off. Personal projects are a way to let off steam and feel agile again. There you can bypass reviews, tests, docs, and just hack hack hack.
• zobzu 13y ago
  All this sounds about right. Sadly. Probably is why companies come and go. Even big ones, eventually.
• songzme 13y ago
  If you would like to work in a place that embrace new technology and value great code, TokBox is hiring: http://tokbox.com/careers http://tokbox.com/careers :)
• d43594 13y ago
  I really hope that this is a sarcastic post? If not, this article is an absolute fking disgrace. First of all this is not how all large companies work. This is how bad companies, with poor leadership, bad process, and a complete lack of understanding work. And no, the answer isn't to be stuck so deep in process that you cannot move! The answer, like most things, is a considered, fitting and appropriate balance. Secondly this attitude stinks. There is no way on Earth I would employ you to work for me. Is it any wonder that the software industry has such a lackluster reputation? An industry full of cowboys and CPs (copy and pasters) like yourself. If you really think like this then you should be looking to change your profession. Yes things need to ship, and no we can't develop forever, but without continuous improvement where do we end up? I am sick of hearing the 'people have lives you know' excuse for utter laziness. If you feel like this then you picked the wrong (rapidly changing) industry to work in. Too bad, so sad. Quit whinging and get a job you can leave behind at the end of the day e.g. shelf stacker.
• stuartd 13y ago
  "Everybody loves finding Stack Overflow answers on search results, but nobody contributes those answers. I can understand that." Hmm. I see lots of excellent answers on Stack Overflow from declared Microsoft engineers, and undoubtedly many more undeclared ones. I think the OP is extrapolating, but also that s/he may have caught something of the culture there..
• IzzyMurad 13y ago
  If I were Bill Gates, I'd fire you without blinking an eye.
• jussij 13y ago
  This does read like someone just out of college, working on their first job. > Every company has its own problems. Over time you'll find most companies/organisations operate in very similar ways. I'd say it's not even specific to the I.T. industry, but rather, just the way people tend to operate. It’s the politics of human interaction and the bigger the organisation the more politics you will find.
• gdix 13y ago
  >If this would have been my own company there would be tons of wiki pages. Ah, to be young and naive again. This is one of those lofty goals that I'm sure everyone aspires to but absolutely no one really ends up doing.
• wreckimnaked 13y ago
  >I am surprised that no one I met in Windows Azure team heard about Heroku or Rackspace, which are direct competitors. That’s acceptable, not everybody has to know these. Am I the only one that thinks this is completely unacceptable?
  • adamconroy 13y ago
    You are probably the only one that believes his statement.
• mtdewcmu 13y ago
  "Expect no documentation in corporations" -- Don't expect code to be documented anywhere, ever. It's great when it exists. Even then, don't expect it to be accurate. "It is not what you do, it is what you sell" -- Capitalism -- welcome to America. "Not everybody is passionate for engineering" -- You could probably find a place to work where everyone is passionate about engineering, but I sense that these places are uncommon and highly competitive. "it is almost impossible to get 2 hours straight of coding for me. I spend most of my time trying to figure out how others’ uncommented/undoumented code work, debugging strange things..." -- That doesn't count? "The world outside is not known here a lot." -- This is probably symptomatic of the time when Microsoft was the center of the universe. It's not true everywhere. "Copy-pasting code can be okay. If somebody sees you doing this outside the corporations, you’ll probably get punched in the face. I’ve seen source files copy pasted across projects." -- In college, you have to show that you can do the assignment yourself. In the open source world, you have to be mindful of copyright and licensing. Inside a company, it's all the company's code, so there's nothing wrong with it. You don't have to prove that you can write it yourself. "Almost 90% of my colleagues use older versions of Office, Windows, Visual Studio and .NET Framework." -- It's pretty common knowledge that that's true outside of Microsoft, but it's interesting to know that it's true inside. "You are hired to do get something needed done. I was not expecting that. It’s hard to find a position in corporations matches what you love to do." -- Again, capitalism. You make things for other people, not yourself. There's always a tension between competing priorities; the thrill of engineering something wonderful, the reality of being part of an organization made up of people, and the need to keep money coming in the door. A lot of things are just facts of life, but an environment can also become toxic. At that point you have to leave.
• rajanikanthr 13y ago
  coming from the same company, here are my few thoughts when I was joined on Day1..i hated that there is no documentation, but learnt about system by talking to people mostly. and infact no one has given me time to learn. right now for the stuff I have been doing, i dont have time to document them. in Agile, my managers are not expecting me to spend time on that. once some user story satisfy biz. req. they dont want to waste spending time on making absoutely beautiful code or at least they move to technical debt and never look at that again. code reviews can be skipped sometimes, usually I too go by offline review and checkin. even the people I work with don't give a fk about open source, HN/reddit or about competitors. at our level we are there to develop what we are told to. If you are interested in something you have to spend time after 6PM at home which is reality in most agile teams. to end 'LIVE WITH IT'
• vbv 13y ago
  I have a gut feeling that you work as an SDET. I have been through the same experience in my first 2 years. SDETs go through a very different experience as compared to a PM or SDE at Microsoft.
• SideburnsOfDoom 13y ago
  > Code reviews can be skipped, for the sake of agility that word, "agility". I do not think that it means what you think it means.
  • mahmud 13y ago
    He forgot the "fr" before that "agility".
• Smudge 13y ago
  It's important to remember that Microsoft is a HUGE company, and the experience varies greatly between divisions and organizations, and even between single products within those orgs.
• greghinch 13y ago
  So is this his "I quit" post? Because it doesn't seem like his superiors are going to be very pleased with this post..
• jack9 13y ago
  This guy was taught some bad practices. He learned things that can only hurt him.
• matwood 13y ago
  Expect no documentation in corporations. True anywhere. Lots of OSS is horribly documented. Documentation is not only hard, but adds debt that now must be maintained. No documentation is better than wrong documentation. It is not what you do, it is what you sell. Welcome to business (and life really). While selling styling changes is going to be hard, selling bug fixing, code changes to be more robust and easier to manage are easy sells. If changes will make it easier (aka cheaper) to add new features even the least technical business person will get it. Not everybody is passionate for engineering. Not everyone has the same engineering passion. I don't care that my new router with IPV6 gives me some large number of IPs, but I do get excited when I can integrate a new framework which makes my job easier. It is all about getting shit done This is life. Do you really think the small companies of the world don't care about getting shit done? The small companies of the world are often more concerned because they don't have MS Office level cash cows keeping them afloat. Latest software, meh. Because it often breaks shit and gets in the way of getting shit done. * I spend most of my time trying to figure out how others’ uncommented/undoumented code work, debugging strange things* Programming is mostly reading code. I don't feel like looking it up right now, but Clean Code references the study. Reading code is coding.
  • alpb 13y ago
    Hey there, author of the post here. Thanks for your comments. I agree all your arguments. This post was intended to be expected vs reality and you are also pointing out the reality. So I am just sharing what my reality is publicly. :) thanks for the comment.
  • AlisdairO 13y ago
    > Programming is mostly reading code. I don't feel like looking it up right now, but Clean Code references the study. Reading code is coding. Well said - certainly the most valuable skill I've picked up post education and working for $BIGCORP is the ability to quickly read and understand other people's code.
• coldskull 13y ago
  perfectly describes some of the top mobile/chipset companies i have worked for. Some of the code is so horrible that you feel it might be worth the time rewriting it. But time is too precious...nobody has time to step back and analyze or point fingers. just get the code fix and ship to it the customer.
• utopkara 13y ago
  As a community, we should react responsibly and warn our members against sharing posts like this. There is almost no useful insight, clearly parts of it are exaggerations, and the whole thing looks like it was written for 15 minutes of HN fame. Couple of karma points isn't worth pissing your co-workers. If you really want karma, just make an empty post with title "If you don't vote up, I'll write a stupid post that will ruin my career." I promise I will vote up.
• rmah 13y ago
  I'm not sure where to start. This is a person at his first job out of college and he's been there for less than a year (two if we're being generous). And yet he has the audacity to say "I learned that one will see this sort of problems in all large scale companies."? Really? This is absurd. I can't wrap my head around the sort of arrogance and myopia that makes a 21 or 22 yr old think that he can describe an entire world from such limited experience. I've been working for over 20+ years now. During that time, I've worked at half a dozen large corps, a few medium sized ones, and a few startups. I've seen both great teams with great practices and bad teams with poor practices. One thing that I can say though: the size of the company didn't seem to have much to do with it. Even with my experience, I don't think I've seen much more than a thin slice of the variance in practices that is out there. Note, I'm not saying that this guy didn't experience what he wrote about at Microsoft. But at a corporation that size, you'll likely find that different groups have different practices. This was certainly true at the large companies I've been at. Some teams were super-sharp, others were sloppy beyond words. Even if all teams at MS suck (which I doubt, but I will admit it's possible), this says nothing about how other companies operate and very little about how large corporations operate. Word of advice: don't mistake the worlds you extrapolate inside your head for reality.
  • coldtea 13y ago
    >This is a person at his first job out of college and he's been there for less than a year. And yet he has the audacity to say "I learned that one will see this sort of problems in all large scale companies."? Really? This is absurd. Can you just learn from his experience that he describes, and get over an inconsequential phrase at a tiny part of the post? Even if it's not applicable "everywhere", it's a nice description of what he found in his parts of Microsoft. Not to mention that as a senior engineer that's seen several companies (and had done contract work for others), it's pretty much spot on in general. >Even with my experience, I don't think I've seen much more than a thin slice of the variance in practices that is out there. Which is besides the point. What he describes it pretty normal stuff, going on all around: 1) companies not having much internal documentation for lots of their stuff, 2) not everyone being overly enthusiastic for coding, 3) code fixes that doesn't have business value are not very welcome, 4) people can mostly squeeze 3-4 hours of good coding a day, etc. That's not some obscure practices, or some arcane rituals that only happen on a small slice of companies. Those are pretty much the norm all around. Some companies might do better or worse in some aspects, but it's not like there are some alien practices or some novel ways to deal with software that are out there in companies and you have to explore very hard to find them... Even if they were, they would be so little spread that it won't matter. >I can't wrap my head around the sort of arrogance and myopia that makes a 21 or 22 yr old think that he can describe an entire world from such limited experience. Are you fucking kidding me? That's what 21 year olds do. Make strong statements and have strong opinions on their limited experience. It's the myopia of not knowing this very basic fact, that I cannot wrap my head around.
• mrwnmonm 13y ago
  i wonder if working at google is the same?
• JonFish85 13y ago
  The biggest thing that sticks out to me is that if you expected to spend more than 3 hours a day writing code as opposed to simply thinking about it / studying it / discussing it / debugging it, you may have been misguided on what a coding job would be. I've only worked on relatively small-headcount projects, and even when the only code in the repo was my own, most of my time is spent debugging things, reading datasheets and discussing design choices with others. Actual writing of new code is fairly minimal, especially after the point in the project where you're making feature changes & additions. It takes a lot of time to figure out what to change without breaking everything! I have to imagine that a job that allows for 8-10 hours of pure coding (not debugging, not discussing design, etc) every day has a boatload of half-finished-but-not-operational projects sitting around, waiting to be tested & completed.
• scotty79 13y ago
  > I have seen the knowledge inside the company is mostly transferred by talking and hands-on sessions. Yes. Exactly. IMHO this is the factor that's responsible for at least 50% of corporate clumsiness. > If this would have been my own company there would be tons of wiki pages. Just having wikis won't help much. I worked at a company that had wiki, people were putting things there as an afterthought. I was total and complete mess. Lot's of information was outdated, duplicated, horribly messy but it still was something. There should probable be some person with sense of structure to prune those pages, nag people about details, construct some sort of tree from these splinters of information. Corporation also had task tracking system. But it wasn't helping. It was used as afterthought to leave a trace that some work is to be done and some work was done. What's actually to be done was passed via face to face contact. Therefore noone cared about task tracking system and what's written there. If you want to keep information, you have to use the system that stores it as crucial (only?) communication chanel.
  • JonFish85 13y ago
    Wikis for documentation: great in theory, sucks in practice. Make a change to source, then you have to figure out where the wiki page is for it. Can't find the wiki page? Make a new one. What folder does it go in? Do you make a new folder? What if a page does exist, but it's wrong? Do you fix the whole thing? Just the part you added? Email the person who last updated it? After 6 months it ends up being a tangled mess of insanity, and no one relies on it. You complain about outdated/indescipherable comments? Imagine that multiplied out. In fact, it's almost worse; at least with code you can try to think like a compiler and figure it out. Without code--yikes!
    • coldtea 13y ago
      Every time I see an OSS project use a Wiki for documentation, I run. In the opposite direction. Wiki documentation 99% of time: we have no documentation, nobody cared to write any, and we setup a barebones wiki app in the hope random people can write some documentation for us.
    • freeman478 13y ago
• deleted 13y ago
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• shaydoc 13y ago
  I am sure there's gazillions of opportunities to do cool stuff with Microsoft, its just a matter of peaking above the water, surveying what's happening and making some connections and eventually moving into something more exciting. In a huge company of course you will encounter all aspects of life, and there is nothing wrong with that, why should everything be full pelt all of the time. Also Microsoft are a business, they have so many products to support, they have customers to keep happy, so innovation is not going to be the core in many of these areas. Seems to me if you want what you are after you should try and get into Microsoft's research department.. What I will say is that overall, from an outsider, to me I find azure extremely innovative as a solution. The power at my hands with Azure is quite phenomenal. I mean, by myself I have been able to build a scalable application that would have been considered a huge project in some companies I had worked for earlier in my career.
• mncolinlee 13y ago
  This article has me worried for the author. His cut-and-paste comments alone would drive most corporate legal and PR teams crazy. Normally, this sort of honest personal blog about corporate culture would be okay inside a corporate intranet portal, but forbidden when sent to the wider tech universe. I hope for his sake that he has understanding managers up the chain and a good second job planned out.
  • deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
  • mtdewcmu 13y ago
    Maybe, but what's wrong with pasting code from one Microsoft project to another? I think the company would be overreacting. This post could have been subtitled, "holy cow, this is not college anymore." Most of it sounds like universal coming-of-age stuff that could have been written about pretty much anywhere.
• VLM 13y ago
  "Everybody loves finding Stack Overflow answers on search results, but nobody contributes those answers." Nobody OFFICIALLY does that. Probably because subsection 89 paragraph 12 clause 9 specifically prohibits that kind of activity on company time, and the company owns everything you produce or think of outside work blah blah blah, only company officers may speak for the company and you're not an officer, and you are never off duty and always working for the company who owns everything you may ever say, therefore you may never communicate with another human being in any manner... officially... in theory... In practice psuedonymity is the rule. No one he's met in 8 months has seen fit to give a kid leverage over him for no apparent reason.
  • YZF 13y ago
    There are quite a few people from Microsoft answering questions on SO with their full name. I don't think this one is a real issue. The % of people who participate in SO is probably small in the total dev population in general.
  • alpb 13y ago
    Hi, I'm the author. I don't think there is a company policy that restricts that or any manager that would be mad because you're answering comments on Stack Overflow. It is all about culture in my reality and I personally post answers whenever I solve stuff.
• nrubin 13y ago
  I think it's weird that this person complains about people going home to live their lives. You know what's awesome about big companies? They know you have a life and they don't try to get in your way for that. There is life beyond the work and the office. Also, Microsoft is a massive company, and this person thinks a single team reflects the entire company culture? It's a huge company with hundreds of teams. One team does not define the organization. This post should be titled "I worked at Azure 8 months out of college and here's what I learned." That would be a more accurate title.
• omniwired 13y ago
  sad panda
• cheshire137 13y ago
  This article is stupid. "I'm fresh out of school, but take my word that this is how ALL corporate jobs are". Then his bullet points are depressing. "Expect the bare minimum, because the bare minimum is A-okay."
• pmarca 13y ago
  I'm pretty sure this is Asok from Dilbert.
• Sindrome 13y ago
  Sounds about right to me. You leave university with an understanding of how things should be done. But reality is nothing like that. Adapt and move forward. I would like to offer one other realization that you need to make early on. Your bosses are your bosses because they are better at playing politics than the people that came before them, not because they are more skilled or talented. The best part of working for a large selective company like MS is that you get to work with skilled/talented Type A personalities. Start building your rolodex. This way when you want to move into a director position or start a company you are miles ahead of everyone else. Cheers!
• reledi 13y ago
  > In college, I learned code quality is as important as the result, turned out wrong. I'm surprised you learned this in college. My department couldn't care less about code quality, and in fact they teach a lot of stuff that goes against the majority of style guides. In an extreme case, I've seen code written by a senior student that repeated tons of code because he didn't use loops, and he passed the assignment just fine.
  • LeonidasXIV 13y ago
    In my university, I'm pretty sure you can graduate with even decent to good grades without having written any single program that worked. So maybe this grind is exactly the right thing for these people.
• jongraehl 13y ago
  Great writing - we really feel along with you ("and that's okay"). It's terrible to care and work with people who don't. Find a new team (in MS or out of it).
• theoutlander 13y ago
  There's a lot of truth to this article. Some of it might be team specific. I've heard Azure in general is still evolving. I spent 6 years in Bing, a few months on internal MS tools, and a year in Exchange. In Bing, I had 20 managers over 5 years whereas in Exchange, I had just one for the entire year. Overall, Test was a joke in Bing and most of the people there weren't passionate about coding. They were simply concerned with their bonuses and paychecks. 360 feedback was all about bringing others down. Managers cared about their promotions and fat checks. This problem might be common across large companies - I've heard that from several friends across the industry. Since I left MS, I've been happier than ever!! Now, I'm making a difference in the world saving millions of lives and the extra time that I put in is well worth it as it's not about competing against yet another product! :)
• joesb 13y ago
  > Expect no documentation in corporations. [...] If this would have been my own company there would be tons of wiki pages. Yes, it it were your company you would have all you employees write tons of document instead of working on new project and actually making money, I know all freelancer and small company have tons of document and run on CMM5. Wonder why all old CEO never thought of this. They should hire this guy to be the new CEO.
• deleted 13y ago
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• michaelochurch 13y ago
  I am going to be really curious to find out how this plays out for OP. I don't know anything about MSFT, but it's a courageous and insightful post that underlines many of the awful truths about typical corporate programming. The nonsense (endless meetings, anti-intellectualism, lack of passion) is why so many people check out for good around 40. I really hate the stereotype that that's normal, though; I go to Lisp meetups and fairly often run into people in their 50s to 70s who are still passionate about technology. I want to know, now and in 6 months, where the OP ends up. I'm not going to get into more detail than this, but one learns a lot (about others, organizations, and oneself) through whistleblowing.
• taude 13y ago
  He's probably right about some things; but he's wrong about people having life outside of work, but that's OK, he's young and his only passion is his code and growing his career. However, there's something about the tone of this posting and the sarcastic overtones that I'd probably fire him....if at least to free him from his corporate shackles so he can go find himself.
• adamconroy 13y ago
  I thought this post was mildly interesting until I hit this statement : "I am surprised that no one I met in Windows Azure team heard about Heroku or Rackspace" Aside from the obvious ambiguities, this simply cannot be true.
• aswath87 13y ago
  I joined MS straight out of college as a SDET too and I agree with most of what this. This is a broad statement, but SDET is generally not the best bet if your goal is to be technical or entrepreneurial. My big regret is that I stuck around for 3 years before deciding to move. My advice - change your role/team/company soon. Realistically, nothing is going to change overnight in your current role or team - the culture has been established over several years. It is important to work on what you are passionate about and in a culture that fits you, especially when you are young and when career is a big part of your life.
• dschiptsov 13y ago
  The only intention of a bureaucrat is to keep and strengthen his's position, that's why they do meetings and paper pushing and finger-pointing most of the time - just to cover his ass and survive to the end-of-year bonus. It is so obvious (and ridiculous) that nginx has more market share than IIS precisely because of lack of meetings and design documents.))
• Aardwolf 13y ago
  > If this would have been my own company there would be tons of wiki pages. Ah how naive :) > The world outside is not known here a lot. I bet you’re reading what sort of latest technologies and tools are out on blogs, Reddit or Hacker News every day. Not reading any tech news sites at all? That is odd, so many developers do. > Not everybody is fond of latest versions here. Must be a Windows culture thing. I don't know many Linux users who aren't using the latest version with all programs often or even automatically updated. Except some university computer labs using ancient Linux distros like Mandrake.
• johan_larson 13y ago
  It's true that engineers who work for large technical companies don't typically pay very much attention to external tools. And there's a good reason for that. Companies like this already have extensive internal ecosystems of tools. These tools were built to work together with other company systems, they adhere to various internal development standards, have teams dedicated to supporting and enhancing them, and are already known and trusted by other engineers and management. For any problem you are likely to encounter as an engineer, there is typically an existing system that already does what you need, or close. This tool can quite probably be improved or reconfigured to do what you need with less effort than it would take to bring in an outside tool and make it fit internal expectations. Because of this, the smart bet is usually to use or extend existing solutions rather than exploring and importing new ones. And really, just learning all about the internal systems is a job in itself, quite enough to sate the curiosity of nearly anyone.