Besides merely being an offhanded dismissal of Microsoft employees, it operates under the presumption 1) salary is a factor that can be disregarded by people an

Besides merely being an offhanded dismissal of Microsoft employees, it operates under the presumption 1) salary is a factor that can be disregarded by people and 2) high salary is negatively correlated with exposure to smart people. In the case of the former, the author is clearly myopic. One needs money to live, and the majority of technology companies reside in cities in which the cost of living is substantially higher than the mean. I'm not sure that it's fiscally tenable to exit school with tens of thousands in debt while being subjected to a massively inflated cost of living, and go right into taking a below-average salary at a startup. If anything, one should take a job at an established company, pay off their debt, then take on risk. In the case of the latter, the author is simply being needlessly dismissive and arrogant. Large companies host hundreds of great engineers and do incredibly meaningful work. Frankly, Microsoft is one of the strongest innovators in the market at the moment. Even if one isn't constructing the most alluring product, one can at least take pride in the fact that they are working on a product with a scope many orders of magnitude larger than most startups. Working on Windows might not be the captivating notion, but it is still meaningful to tens of millions of users.