4 ms·

What drove me from Microsoft was: - A culture of burnout (really, really bad death marches, mostly because upper management had fucked up by dithering about wh

by kabdib 13y ago

What drove me from Microsoft was: - A culture of burnout (really, really bad death marches, mostly because upper management had fucked up by dithering about what products to make) - A lack of respect for engineering quality (when the build for your project is broken for weeks at a time, you'd expect management to get a clue -- I mean, what are managers for? -- rather than ask about how things are going with the schedule) - A lack of respect for your time, realized as a reluctance to buy equipment (I got my build times down to two hours, from four hours, by buying my own computers. Yup, I probably spent $5K on computers while I was at MS because my managers didn't see the benefit in buying faster hardware), and by scheduling tons of nonsense meetings. - Politics (oh God, the politics). MS needs to fire about half of its "partner" rank people. There are good eggs there, really smart people, but then there are the ones who . . . aren't. (When they do get around to axing half of the partners, I'm betting it'll be the wrong half). A year and a bit later, I'm at a place where they realize that the most valuable thing is your time, and equipment is Not A Problem. It's a great thing when you're the bottleneck.

EdwardDiego 13y ago
Those respect points are really crucial. I mean how much does a new computer cost vs. how much does a developer's time cost?
- kabdib 13y ago
  It's been over a year, and I'm still angry. Let's say that a "good" desktop computer is $10,000. Just load the thing with enterprise scale SSDs, fast spinning disks, CPUs, RAM and so forth. I think you'll be hard pressed to spend that much on something that you'd want near a desk. (I'm assuming that you've already bought the developer the two or three large displays and a decent graphics card). Let's say this gets builds down from 4 hours to 1 hour, and a developer has to do a build like this on average once a day. At $80/hour, this takes 42 hours, or maybe two months (spread out) to breakeven. By NOT buying your developers great machines, you are costing your company money. "But that comes out of a different budget!" Who cares? The shareholders (who the management chain proxies) should be delighted that developers have faster machines. Of course, multi-hour builds are nonsense, too. MS has a whole cloud infrastructure that they should be leveraging the crap out of, to make sure that developers are the bottleneck again. I'll bet they could get Windows to build inside ten minutes, if they put the right people on it.
  - jacalata 13y ago
    Were you there when Ballmer promised every employee would get a new windows 8 machine? I am still shocked at how they could mismanage that so badly - almost everyone I know was angrier about their equipment after that effort than before.

by kabdib 13y ago

EdwardDiego 13y ago

Those respect points are really crucial. I mean how much does a new computer cost vs. how much does a developer's time cost?

kabdib 13y ago
It's been over a year, and I'm still angry. Let's say that a "good" desktop computer is $10,000. Just load the thing with enterprise scale SSDs, fast spinning disks, CPUs, RAM and so forth. I think you'll be hard pressed to spend that much on something that you'd want near a desk. (I'm assuming that you've already bought the developer the two or three large displays and a decent graphics card). Let's say this gets builds down from 4 hours to 1 hour, and a developer has to do a build like this on average once a day. At $80/hour, this takes 42 hours, or maybe two months (spread out) to breakeven. By NOT buying your developers great machines, you are costing your company money. "But that comes out of a different budget!" Who cares? The shareholders (who the management chain proxies) should be delighted that developers have faster machines. Of course, multi-hour builds are nonsense, too. MS has a whole cloud infrastructure that they should be leveraging the crap out of, to make sure that developers are the bottleneck again. I'll bet they could get Windows to build inside ten minutes, if they put the right people on it.
- jacalata 13y ago
  Were you there when Ballmer promised every employee would get a new windows 8 machine? I am still shocked at how they could mismanage that so badly - almost everyone I know was angrier about their equipment after that effort than before.