45 ms·

The most obvious question: Does Microsoft annually fire the X% lowest "performing" as some other shops do? But more importantly, there are much bigger problems

by ballard 13y ago

The most obvious question: Does Microsoft annually fire the X% lowest "performing" as some other shops do? But more importantly, there are much bigger problems at Microsoft than gaming performance reviews: product strategy, how people are treated and relations between divisions. MSFT may need to let go of some legacy in order to move forward faster. (Risk enterprise customer hate, but whatevs.)

smm2000 13y ago
Nope, it's very difficult to get fired from Microsoft unless you try really hard. Answering emails and doing minimum amount of coding (1 hour/day) is enough in most groups to get average reviews.
- einhverfr 13y ago
  I had a friend at Microsoft when I was there who tried to get a URL spoofing vulnerability fixed by the IE team and when that failed used it to hack their hotmail accounts. He almost got fired over that one. I knew one person who did get fired. The thing though was that the firing occurred at a time when they were trying to push for higher attrition during a move of a unit overseas so not sure how much I can read into it.
- city41 13y ago
  Hmm, I had a different experience during my 3 years at MS. On my team, people definitely got fired. Having worked at companies where getting fired is unheard of, I really appreciated that the deadwood got shown the door. Although I must admit my experience at MS really does not match up with a lot of what I'm reading in this thread. I suspect my team was quite an outlier.
- akurilin 13y ago
  Knew an SDE II with 10 years of experience at MS who didn't know how to grep through a file to find out which log lines started with a certain word. Guy seemed have been holding pretty well onto his job, probably senior by now. Plenty of deadwood.
  - Hydraulix989 13y ago
    I guarantee said developer knows how to use "findstr" in the DOS shell to accomplish the same task though. Remember, this is Microsoft.
    - akurilin 13y ago
      I used "grep" in a generic way. My comment referred to whatever grepping tool available on that platform, which at the time was indeed findstr, as you suggested, and Powershell. Of course it'd have been silly to expect a Windows-only-ever person to be familiar with Unix tools, that was not the point at all.
marcosdumay 13y ago
Product strategy is useless if you can't grab a team of A-players to actually create products. Also, your ranking methodology defines the possible kinds of relations between teams and institution-employee communications you can have. Yes, there are certainly other factors making MS suffer now (like the fact that they like to compete with their clients, and destroy them), but this one may even be the largest one.

by ballard 13y ago

smm2000 13y ago

Nope, it's very difficult to get fired from Microsoft unless you try really hard. Answering emails and doing minimum amount of coding (1 hour/day) is enough in most groups to get average reviews.

einhverfr 13y ago
I had a friend at Microsoft when I was there who tried to get a URL spoofing vulnerability fixed by the IE team and when that failed used it to hack their hotmail accounts. He almost got fired over that one. I knew one person who did get fired. The thing though was that the firing occurred at a time when they were trying to push for higher attrition during a move of a unit overseas so not sure how much I can read into it.
city41 13y ago
Hmm, I had a different experience during my 3 years at MS. On my team, people definitely got fired. Having worked at companies where getting fired is unheard of, I really appreciated that the deadwood got shown the door. Although I must admit my experience at MS really does not match up with a lot of what I'm reading in this thread. I suspect my team was quite an outlier.
akurilin 13y ago
Knew an SDE II with 10 years of experience at MS who didn't know how to grep through a file to find out which log lines started with a certain word. Guy seemed have been holding pretty well onto his job, probably senior by now. Plenty of deadwood.
- Hydraulix989 13y ago
  I guarantee said developer knows how to use "findstr" in the DOS shell to accomplish the same task though. Remember, this is Microsoft.
  - akurilin 13y ago
    I used "grep" in a generic way. My comment referred to whatever grepping tool available on that platform, which at the time was indeed findstr, as you suggested, and Powershell. Of course it'd have been silly to expect a Windows-only-ever person to be familiar with Unix tools, that was not the point at all.

marcosdumay 13y ago

Product strategy is useless if you can't grab a team of A-players to actually create products. Also, your ranking methodology defines the possible kinds of relations between teams and institution-employee communications you can have. Yes, there are certainly other factors making MS suffer now (like the fact that they like to compete with their clients, and destroy them), but this one may even be the largest one.