8 ms·
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 docume
by 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- Literally any piece of documentation was always 1+ years out of date.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 agoAlthough 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 agoIt'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 agoProgramming 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 agoYes. 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 agoThere'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.
- JonFish85 13y agoMicrosoft is the complete opposite of Facebook's "Move fast and break things". And that's a good thing, in a lot of ways. When entire companies (industries?) are dependent on you: slow & steady to get it right is much, much better than moving quickly to integrate the newest technology.
- martydill 13y agoInterestingly, many companies including mine are dependent on Facebook and their APIs. They do move fast and break things, and we feel the pain of it practically every day.
- infinitone 13y agoHow is Microsoft slow and steady when he just told you they have poor code quality, no docs, etc.
- jussij 13y ago
- silverbax88 13y agoThis is a very accurate statement. Only developers with several years of battle-tested, crunch-time experience know the dangers and headaches of trying to fix something that was implemented because it was 'new' and 'cool'. Sometimes new stuff is awesome. Most of the time, it's just new.
- mmmelissa 13y agoI agree. I like to avoid being an early adopter for anything business or work related because it is so much easier to use things when there is an already established user community who has found and fixed/worked around most the major bugs. Time is money.
- cmbaus 13y agoReferring to comments as dangerous is dangerous.
- jimmaswell 13y agoI didn't know ASP.NET was considered something in the same level of winxp or word 2003 at the point - maybe the original ASP. Unless that's not what you were implying.
- 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 agoI agree. I do think, however, that a 10am-8pm work day (or later) is not at all uncommon in Silicon Valley
- jgh 13y agoWorking 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 agoThis. 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 agoActually yes, it's called a bonus.
- kryten 13y agoI 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 agoEmployers 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 agoNot 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 agoWell, 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 agoArriving 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 agoDifferent strokes for different folks, right?
- marssaxman 13y agoPretty much :-)
- dham 13y agoWhat planet do you live on? In the USA 8-5 or 6 is the norm.
- marssaxman 13y agoI 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 agoYea 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 agoOn 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 agoThis 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 agoHey 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 agoCOWORKERS 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 agoHow, 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.