21 ms·

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

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and Office), and his statements are nearly 100% accurate: - Literally any piece of documentation was always 1+ years out of date.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.
  - nealabq 13y ago
    It's curiosity that's important, not new stuff. We read HN because we're curious, and we don't want to miss anything. We don't get stuck on old inferior tools (at least not at home) because we like to tinker and explore. You can judge people, to some extent, based on their reading, their tools, how informed they are about the competition. Programming is like surfing a tidal wave of information and change; you don't improve by sticking your head in the sand. (Yeah, that last sentence is a tidal wave of mixed metaphore tossed like a salad.)
    - cobrausn 13y ago
      'Inferior' is often a matter of perspective.
    - ownagefool 13y ago
      Programming is more like surfing an infinite amount of tidal waves of information change. Every wave is different, but ultimately they're all just waves regardless of how much people argue which is superior to the other. Point being, when you're 35 and an expert in your field, you probably need to spend less time learning what the cool kids are up to as opposed to when you're 23 and learning your field and everything you learn is new. That doesn't mean that you can let yourself not be current, but if your future plans are to work 12 hours per day then go home and read HN at night, I pity your wife and family prospects. :p
    - weavie 13y ago
      Yes. And it's not just learning new stuff. It's important to just keep learning stuff. It's shocking how many of my team mates haven't even heard about Scheme, let alone tried to learn it. And yet learning that language (I'm still working on it) is revolutionising the quality of my code. There's a lot of important stuff that was developed years ago that's just as important as stuff that's coming out today.
  - ownagefool 13y ago
    There's a ton of wrong with that statements tone, not that I think the author meant it that way, but I'll point it out regardless: #1 - The majority of HN seems to involve typical latests web crud app fads. It's probably also not that interesting to *nix system developers either, though many might read it for the apps being created as opposed to the how. #2 - Having MongoDB on your CV generally means you're developing for your CV. Occasionally it means you had a valid usecase, but if you tried to sell me on that for a typical app, I'd never hire you. #3 - The bleeding edge is called that for a reason. Sometimes you'll bleed and theres very good reasons to stick with tried and tested. #4 - It's easier to make it simple to get up and running when you have that from the start or early on, and working with techs that make that easy. Not so much when you're inherited a lot of legacy, some of it you don't even understand. For what it's worth, MS make some decent products, so it's hard to entirely slate them but I imagine the GPs opinion that they could be doing things a lot better is also true, just some of the points were kinda off base imo. If anything.
- jes5199 13y ago
  > A lot of my coworkers were over 35. ... Working past 6 was considered absurd It is absurd. Experience teaches you that.
  - ngoel36 13y ago
    I agree. I do think, however, that a 10am-8pm work day (or later) is not at all uncommon in Silicon Valley
- jgh 13y ago
  Working past 6 should be considered absurd unless you start at 10 or 11.. There's a world out there for you to enjoy, and many people fought hard for workers rights so we don't have kill ourselves over work.
  - kryten 13y ago
    This. Joy to the European work ethic. I haven't worked past 5 for the last 10 years. I refuse to do unpaid work and overtime. Would your employer bill you out for free? Nope.
    - DrJokepu 13y ago
      Actually yes, it's called a bonus.
      - kryten 13y ago
        I get a hefty one of them as well. What's your point? I don't expect one. My basic salary is what I expect.
        DrJokepu 13y ago
        Employers hand out bonuses to incentivise enployees to stay. Employees do unpaid overtime to incentivise employers to keep them. My point is that they are fundamentally similar concepts. It's great that you're in a position where your employer wants to incentivise you to stay around by giving you bonuses yet you don't need to do overtime to keep your job. I'm also in a similar position. Some people aren't, and this has nothing to do with European work culture or work ethics. It's supply and demand.
        kryten 13y ago
        Not being disposable or fungible is their incentive for keeping me. The things that make me stay at a company isn't the carrot dangled in front of me like some circus animal who needs to do their performance. People are too grateful for jobs. Employers use this to enforce servitude on people under terrible terms and people just lap it up every time. I'd rather sleep on the street than sell my soul.
- scld 13y ago
  Well, honestly, working past 6 all the time should be considered absurd (assuming you are arriving at work between 7 and 8). I understand the benefit of hard work but I see too much youth wasted on free labor given to corporations.
  - marssaxman 13y ago
    Arriving at work between 7 and 8? Are you crazy? I don't even get out of bed that early. ...on the other hand, I think 10 AM - 6 PM is a pretty reasonable work day.
    - greyboy 13y ago
      Different strokes for different folks, right?
      - marssaxman 13y ago
        Pretty much :-)
    - dham 13y ago
      What planet do you live on? In the USA 8-5 or 6 is the norm.
      - marssaxman 13y ago
        I know what the corporate norm is, but I do not care, because I live on planet hacker. My brain does nothing of any value before around eleven AM and its peak productivity kicks in around 2-3 pm. An 8-5 schedule would be a great way to waste my time and my employer's money.
        dham 13y ago
        Yea true. I'm just saying there are tons of things to be done even if it's not coding. I agree with you on the coding productivity but if you walked into a company the first day and said "Oh I'm just working 11 to 2 every day", they probably wouldn't like that too much.
- rlu 13y ago
  On the other hand, I had different experiences both times when interning at Microsoft. Anyone that works or has worked at Microsoft should all end any "my experience" post with one sentence: your mileage may vary. Microsoft is a gigantic company where team culture varies widely. Some may consider this a good thing, others a bad thing. I don't really care. I just call it a fact and as such "my experience at MS" posts are usually pretty meh unless the author him/herself realizes that their team's culture is probably extremely different (for better or for worse) from other teams' culture. I think it's a pretty important footnote to include, that's all.
- sliverstorm 13y ago
  This is how MOST computer science majors spend their careers. And I'm thankful they do. Most of the very large projects that act on an extremely large scale require that sort of day-to-day grind. The spark is important too, but great things are 1% inspiration, 99% perspiration. Just look at the code studies. Open-source projects of great accomplishment like the Linux kernel have just as many hours (those hours are just distributed a bit more)
- alpb 13y ago
  Hey there, author of the post here. Thanks for supporting me, that feels good and I agree your points 100%. I organized a "hackathon event" in The Garage for 2011 summer interns, maybe you have heard of it. I still push these sort of events and seminars that we all can more learn the outside world beyond the individual efforts. Thanks for comment!
- guyzero 13y ago
  COWORKERS OVER 35?? I'm shocked they hadn't been "renewed" by "Carrousel". Or were they runners?
- davidong 13y ago
  > I actually was able to do some open source work with Codeplex Nice, I guess people in your area had done this before and nobody was scared of sharing code. My experience wasn't so good. I wrote some BizTalk VS-LoadTest extensions while contracting at Microsoft UK and battled for the best part of 3 months to get permission to share them on CodePlex. While everyone agreed it was good for the company and the products and an all-round good idea to open source the code, nobody would put their neck on the line and give me written permission to do so. So it didn't happen.
- thornkin 13y ago
  How, after 2 summers as an intern, do you know how many times people were promoted? Microsoft doesn't let people sit around for 12-18 years.
robbiea 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. Agreed. This is not something you write publicly WHILE working for the company. I know his intentions weren't to slander the company that is paying him, but it will most likely have bad consequences within his team.
yuhong 13y ago
I still remember this: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/philipsu/archive/2006/06/14/631438.aspx http://blogs.msdn.com/b/philipsu/archive/2006/06/14/631438.a...
yuhong 13y ago
Also: http://www.proudlyserving.com/archives/2005/09/an_open_letter.html http://www.proudlyserving.com/archives/2005/09/an_open_lette...
- joesb 13y ago
  I do think there's a different between opinion of a manager who's been working for ten years and a new-grad who's just had his first job for eight months.
mbell 13y ago
> Publishing something that HR/PR can consider slander The truth can not under any reasonable definition be considered slander.
- venomsnake 13y ago
  And HR and PR departments in any company have always been the pinnacle of reasonableness
  - wololo 13y ago
    http://injury.findlaw.com/torts-and-personal-injuries/defenses-to-libel-and-slander.html http://injury.findlaw.com/torts-and-personal-injuries/defens... "truth serves as an affirmative defense to an action for libel or slander"
coldtea 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. That's to me the equivalent of saying: "sitting on the front of the bus, as a black person, is a recipe for trouble". Not in the sense that it's racist, of course. But that it trivialises a problematic situation, and asks for caution from the (potential) victim. It's not what he did that's problematic, it's the very notion that a company would consider firing someone over sharing something as innocent and truthful as this. And that we should somehow "accept it" and just "be cautious" not to have this happen to us.
- andrewflnr 13y ago
  Even if someone is going to be brave and try to change things, it's good if they know what they're getting into, rather than just blunder into it. Although, blundering might have it's positive points in this scenario.
- sliverstorm 13y ago
  I think your parent is just suggesting something like publishing under a pseudonym, which doesn't sound like trivializing the problem.
- venomsnake 13y ago
  Okay - I will elaborate a bit. Fortune 500 companies tend to be trigger happy lately and not backing their employees. You saw what happened with the #dealwithit guy. And that was for sentiment the whole company backs because it just happened to be true. If Snowden did not leave the US so fast we would all agree that this would have been stupid. Not the leak but not taking the basic precautions. Also he is not having personal issues or being harassed from what I read - so the situation is not a civil or worker's right problem that would require that kind of whistleblowing. It is a rant with proper place on thedailywtf with good privacy protection.
  - hammock 13y ago
    > Fortune 500 companies tend to be trigger happy lately and not backing their employees. All the more reason to speak his mind rather than try and feign some sort of loyalty to the man, which will never be returned.
driverdan 13y ago
Getting fired from a job that sounds as miserable as his description depicts seems like a good thing to me. It's not like he'll have trouble finding a new one.
- genwin 13y ago
  A prospective future employer will likely be concerned he'll openly write about that employer too. Thus, passed over.
  - fallenpegasus 13y ago
    I wouldn't not hire him for it.
ragsagar 13y ago
He might be sure that his HR/PR will never look into his blog or read HN or Reddit.

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.
- nealabq 13y ago
  It's curiosity that's important, not new stuff. We read HN because we're curious, and we don't want to miss anything. We don't get stuck on old inferior tools (at least not at home) because we like to tinker and explore. You can judge people, to some extent, based on their reading, their tools, how informed they are about the competition. Programming is like surfing a tidal wave of information and change; you don't improve by sticking your head in the sand. (Yeah, that last sentence is a tidal wave of mixed metaphore tossed like a salad.)
  - cobrausn 13y ago
    'Inferior' is often a matter of perspective.
  - ownagefool 13y ago
    Programming is more like surfing an infinite amount of tidal waves of information change. Every wave is different, but ultimately they're all just waves regardless of how much people argue which is superior to the other. Point being, when you're 35 and an expert in your field, you probably need to spend less time learning what the cool kids are up to as opposed to when you're 23 and learning your field and everything you learn is new. That doesn't mean that you can let yourself not be current, but if your future plans are to work 12 hours per day then go home and read HN at night, I pity your wife and family prospects. :p
  - weavie 13y ago
    Yes. And it's not just learning new stuff. It's important to just keep learning stuff. It's shocking how many of my team mates haven't even heard about Scheme, let alone tried to learn it. And yet learning that language (I'm still working on it) is revolutionising the quality of my code. There's a lot of important stuff that was developed years ago that's just as important as stuff that's coming out today.
- ownagefool 13y ago
  There's a ton of wrong with that statements tone, not that I think the author meant it that way, but I'll point it out regardless: #1 - The majority of HN seems to involve typical latests web crud app fads. It's probably also not that interesting to *nix system developers either, though many might read it for the apps being created as opposed to the how. #2 - Having MongoDB on your CV generally means you're developing for your CV. Occasionally it means you had a valid usecase, but if you tried to sell me on that for a typical app, I'd never hire you. #3 - The bleeding edge is called that for a reason. Sometimes you'll bleed and theres very good reasons to stick with tried and tested. #4 - It's easier to make it simple to get up and running when you have that from the start or early on, and working with techs that make that easy. Not so much when you're inherited a lot of legacy, some of it you don't even understand. For what it's worth, MS make some decent products, so it's hard to entirely slate them but I imagine the GPs opinion that they could be doing things a lot better is also true, just some of the points were kinda off base imo. If anything.
jes5199 13y ago
> A lot of my coworkers were over 35. ... Working past 6 was considered absurd It is absurd. Experience teaches you that.
- ngoel36 13y ago
  I agree. I do think, however, that a 10am-8pm work day (or later) is not at all uncommon in Silicon Valley
jgh 13y ago
Working past 6 should be considered absurd unless you start at 10 or 11.. There's a world out there for you to enjoy, and many people fought hard for workers rights so we don't have kill ourselves over work.
- kryten 13y ago
  This. Joy to the European work ethic. I haven't worked past 5 for the last 10 years. I refuse to do unpaid work and overtime. Would your employer bill you out for free? Nope.
  - DrJokepu 13y ago
    Actually yes, it's called a bonus.
    - kryten 13y ago
      I get a hefty one of them as well. What's your point? I don't expect one. My basic salary is what I expect.
      - DrJokepu 13y ago
        Employers hand out bonuses to incentivise enployees to stay. Employees do unpaid overtime to incentivise employers to keep them. My point is that they are fundamentally similar concepts. It's great that you're in a position where your employer wants to incentivise you to stay around by giving you bonuses yet you don't need to do overtime to keep your job. I'm also in a similar position. Some people aren't, and this has nothing to do with European work culture or work ethics. It's supply and demand.
        kryten 13y ago
        Not being disposable or fungible is their incentive for keeping me. The things that make me stay at a company isn't the carrot dangled in front of me like some circus animal who needs to do their performance. People are too grateful for jobs. Employers use this to enforce servitude on people under terrible terms and people just lap it up every time. I'd rather sleep on the street than sell my soul.
scld 13y ago
Well, honestly, working past 6 all the time should be considered absurd (assuming you are arriving at work between 7 and 8). I understand the benefit of hard work but I see too much youth wasted on free labor given to corporations.
- marssaxman 13y ago
  Arriving at work between 7 and 8? Are you crazy? I don't even get out of bed that early. ...on the other hand, I think 10 AM - 6 PM is a pretty reasonable work day.
  - greyboy 13y ago
    Different strokes for different folks, right?
    - marssaxman 13y ago
      Pretty much :-)
  - dham 13y ago
    What planet do you live on? In the USA 8-5 or 6 is the norm.
    - marssaxman 13y ago
      I know what the corporate norm is, but I do not care, because I live on planet hacker. My brain does nothing of any value before around eleven AM and its peak productivity kicks in around 2-3 pm. An 8-5 schedule would be a great way to waste my time and my employer's money.
      - dham 13y ago
        Yea true. I'm just saying there are tons of things to be done even if it's not coding. I agree with you on the coding productivity but if you walked into a company the first day and said "Oh I'm just working 11 to 2 every day", they probably wouldn't like that too much.
rlu 13y ago
On the other hand, I had different experiences both times when interning at Microsoft. Anyone that works or has worked at Microsoft should all end any "my experience" post with one sentence: your mileage may vary. Microsoft is a gigantic company where team culture varies widely. Some may consider this a good thing, others a bad thing. I don't really care. I just call it a fact and as such "my experience at MS" posts are usually pretty meh unless the author him/herself realizes that their team's culture is probably extremely different (for better or for worse) from other teams' culture. I think it's a pretty important footnote to include, that's all.
sliverstorm 13y ago
This is how MOST computer science majors spend their careers. And I'm thankful they do. Most of the very large projects that act on an extremely large scale require that sort of day-to-day grind. The spark is important too, but great things are 1% inspiration, 99% perspiration. Just look at the code studies. Open-source projects of great accomplishment like the Linux kernel have just as many hours (those hours are just distributed a bit more)
alpb 13y ago
Hey there, author of the post here. Thanks for supporting me, that feels good and I agree your points 100%. I organized a "hackathon event" in The Garage for 2011 summer interns, maybe you have heard of it. I still push these sort of events and seminars that we all can more learn the outside world beyond the individual efforts. Thanks for comment!
guyzero 13y ago
COWORKERS OVER 35?? I'm shocked they hadn't been "renewed" by "Carrousel". Or were they runners?
davidong 13y ago
> I actually was able to do some open source work with Codeplex Nice, I guess people in your area had done this before and nobody was scared of sharing code. My experience wasn't so good. I wrote some BizTalk VS-LoadTest extensions while contracting at Microsoft UK and battled for the best part of 3 months to get permission to share them on CodePlex. While everyone agreed it was good for the company and the products and an all-round good idea to open source the code, nobody would put their neck on the line and give me written permission to do so. So it didn't happen.
thornkin 13y ago
How, after 2 summers as an intern, do you know how many times people were promoted? Microsoft doesn't let people sit around for 12-18 years.

robbiea 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. Agreed. This is not something you write publicly WHILE working for the company. I know his intentions weren't to slander the company that is paying him, but it will most likely have bad consequences within his team.

yuhong 13y ago

I still remember this: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/philipsu/archive/2006/06/14/631438.aspx http://blogs.msdn.com/b/philipsu/archive/2006/06/14/631438.a...

yuhong 13y ago

Also: http://www.proudlyserving.com/archives/2005/09/an_open_letter.html http://www.proudlyserving.com/archives/2005/09/an_open_lette...

joesb 13y ago
I do think there's a different between opinion of a manager who's been working for ten years and a new-grad who's just had his first job for eight months.

mbell 13y ago

> Publishing something that HR/PR can consider slander The truth can not under any reasonable definition be considered slander.

venomsnake 13y ago
And HR and PR departments in any company have always been the pinnacle of reasonableness
- wololo 13y ago
  http://injury.findlaw.com/torts-and-personal-injuries/defenses-to-libel-and-slander.html http://injury.findlaw.com/torts-and-personal-injuries/defens... "truth serves as an affirmative defense to an action for libel or slander"

coldtea 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. That's to me the equivalent of saying: "sitting on the front of the bus, as a black person, is a recipe for trouble". Not in the sense that it's racist, of course. But that it trivialises a problematic situation, and asks for caution from the (potential) victim. It's not what he did that's problematic, it's the very notion that a company would consider firing someone over sharing something as innocent and truthful as this. And that we should somehow "accept it" and just "be cautious" not to have this happen to us.

andrewflnr 13y ago
Even if someone is going to be brave and try to change things, it's good if they know what they're getting into, rather than just blunder into it. Although, blundering might have it's positive points in this scenario.
sliverstorm 13y ago
I think your parent is just suggesting something like publishing under a pseudonym, which doesn't sound like trivializing the problem.
venomsnake 13y ago
Okay - I will elaborate a bit. Fortune 500 companies tend to be trigger happy lately and not backing their employees. You saw what happened with the #dealwithit guy. And that was for sentiment the whole company backs because it just happened to be true. If Snowden did not leave the US so fast we would all agree that this would have been stupid. Not the leak but not taking the basic precautions. Also he is not having personal issues or being harassed from what I read - so the situation is not a civil or worker's right problem that would require that kind of whistleblowing. It is a rant with proper place on thedailywtf with good privacy protection.
- hammock 13y ago
  > Fortune 500 companies tend to be trigger happy lately and not backing their employees. All the more reason to speak his mind rather than try and feign some sort of loyalty to the man, which will never be returned.

driverdan 13y ago

Getting fired from a job that sounds as miserable as his description depicts seems like a good thing to me. It's not like he'll have trouble finding a new one.

genwin 13y ago
A prospective future employer will likely be concerned he'll openly write about that employer too. Thus, passed over.
- fallenpegasus 13y ago
  I wouldn't not hire him for it.

ragsagar 13y ago

He might be sure that his HR/PR will never look into his blog or read HN or Reddit.