7 ms·

Working at Microsoft (2004)

92 points by luu 11y ago

serve_yay 11y ago
When was this written?
- dsmitchell1 11y ago
  It appears to be 2004. He indicates that he was hired in 1999, and elsewhere he talks about the number of managers he's had in five years.
  - TheOtherHobbes 11y ago
    The resume shows he moved to Yahoo in 2007, then Amazon, then went independent. I wonder what a similar post would say about Microsoft today.
  - sctb 11y ago
    Thanks, we've updated the title.
  - serve_yay 11y ago
    Well. I may not have any inside info but I'd wager that 2004 MS and 2015 MS are very different workplaces indeed.
    - markjbrown 11y ago
      They are/were. I worked there from Feb 2000 until Dec 2014. The company changed a great deal over that time. Without commenting directly on Ballmer I will say Satya Nadella is a great CEO and he is doing a great job transforming the company.
      - MichaelGG 11y ago
        Hopefully he will take responsibility for cleaning up the app store and stop focusing on app count. I wrote Satya, the GM of the Windows Store, and various PMs on that team, but nothing. Countless tons of crap on the store. MS paying for shovelware. CSRs defending fake versions of Dropbox. Fake Windows Updates on the store. Publishers pretending to be Microsoft or other big vendors. Smaller ISVs unable to get scam versions of their software removed. Hell, even Netflix had s tough time getting rid of fake Netflix apps.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- Plough_Jogger 11y ago
  First cached by the Internet Archive in Feb. 2005 https://web.archive.org/web/20050208021807/http://www.qbrundage.com/michaelb/pubs/essays/working_at_microsoft.html https://web.archive.org/web/20050208021807/http://www.qbrund...
cryowaffle 11y ago
All blogs should be required to have datestamps! :)
jjcm 11y ago
Since this blog is a bit dated, here are some things that have changed in the last 10 years from the perspective of someone who works here now. First some background to fill in the time between when he wrote this and now: When Vista dropped, public opinion of Microsoft started to go out the door. That was right around the same time that Apple released its first iphone (2007), and with a failed OS and a hugely successful device release by Apple, Microsoft fell by the wayside. Public opinion tanked a bit, and it seemed like the only "positive" energy was Steve Ballmer. Whether or not you can call his energy "positive" is debatable, but he was certainly energetic. Few employees actually liked Ballmer though, so when Satya came on it was a breath of fresh air. Satya came in at an absolutely perfect time - hololens and windows 10 were just about to be announced, meaning he'd get immense credit despite only being here for a short period. With a new CEO, Hololens, and Win10 on the horizon, public opinion (and our stock price) of MS has started to go up. The corporate culture in the last year has changed drastically, and support for open source internally has shot up (which as someone with a linux/unix background has really made me happy). Four or Five years ago, if you'd asked me what tech company I worked for, my answer would have probably been, "Microsoft, I know, it's a bummer. I'm trying to move to google". Now though people actually think MS is cool again. The stuff we're working on is exciting and the corporate culture is starting to get healthy.
- vidoc 11y ago
  Was stack ranking already common practice when this article was written (2004) and is it actually over now (2015) ?
  - RyJones 11y ago
    stack ranking had been going on for many review cycles at this point and I heard last night that it's gone for good (wink wink, nudge nudge) because they still have to allocate bonuses and stock.
- tdicola 11y ago
  Err, that's kinda greatly simplifying things. I'd say the last 10 years can be described as: - ~2005 to ~2009 was the Ray Ozzie era. Ozzie took over the role of Chief Software Architect from Bill Gates in 2006 and the company, internally and externally, was focused on very ambitious projects. Software 'architects' were common on every team and usually doing something the 'right' way trumped shipping quickly and iterating. There were lots of interesting ideas and cool tech, but turning that stuff into viable products and businesses proved to be difficult. - ~2009 to 2013 was the Steven Sinofsky era. Sinofsky took over as the head of the Windows division after Vista and helped recover with the Windows 7 release. His influence quickly spread and most of the company adopted his management structure (very strict separation of concerns between development, test, and product management). The role of software architect quickly disappeared (and Ray Ozzie left the company, leaving the CSA position to disappear entirely) and although research was still important it was definitely not the top priority. There was much less focus on building platforms, ideas, or other intangible things vs. shipping to customers in controlled and predictable ways. Post 2013 and Steve Ballmer stepping down I don't really know much since I left around that time.
VOYD 11y ago
It really depends on what product you land on, and what your career goals are. And you'd better have career goals, because if you don't you are looked down upon. Doesn't everyone want the CEO's jobs? It's still as hyper-competitive as ever, and to a certain degree, even more so since M$FT has invested in creating job centers around the world. Microsoft still employees more "temps" than FTEs, just saying.
bjwbell 11y ago
His page http://michaelbrundage.com/note/2005/05/15/xbox-360-emulator/ http://michaelbrundage.com/note/2005/05/15/xbox-360-emulator... gives a taste of the xbox emulator project. Now I want to learn so much more.
yulaow 11y ago
Any comments related to the situation in the branches of Microsoft around the world? (like Microsoft Uk, Ge, Fr, Br, It, etc... you understood) I have some friends in Microsoft Uk and they all talk really bad about the company, both in how it is managed and in the support they get from other members of the team. Just to say one of my friends got his access card only after two weeks and a usable laptop after 7 and only after receiving two or three that got infinite BSODs.
icefox 11y ago
> At Microsoft, I've had access to the source code for Halo 1 & 2, Internet Explorer, MDAC, MSXML, the .NET Frameworks and CLR, SQL Server, SQLXML, Virtual PC, Visual Studio, Windows, the Xbox and Xbox Live, and probably several other projects that I've forgotten about. Does it get better than this? This is horrible! Sure you get to see the internal stuff, but in 2004 you were also forbidden from looking at any open source software. So sure you could see a handful of software titles that you can list on your fingers, but the millions of other programs you couldn't. How can someone that says "I love source code. I love reading it, writing it, thinking about it." possibly have been happy about being walled off from the rest of the software world? The last section on influence was wrong in hindsight. Sure Microsoft had influence in the 90's, but if you joined them in 2004 I can hardly think of them as influential in the last decade. Incremental improvement with a lot of churn for churn sake.
- axy108 11y ago
  >you were also forbidden from looking at any open source software For work/internal use, but I'm pretty sure he kept using it in his free time.
elg0nz 11y ago
Well, it looks like he's back on Microsoft. https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaelb https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaelb
DubiousPusher 11y ago
My 2 cents working here. Focus: Yes, this place still is 100% about making software. Yes, sometimes the company still pushes hard for really stupid things. That's getting better. Unreality: I have no idea what he's talking about. Maybe upper management but everyone I work with is a real person with real financial concerns and life goals. I've had many conversations about poverty and its effects on people. Most people I talk to wonder how people making median salaries get by in the area. Personal Freedom: Yeah right. It's not like anyone's got you at the point of a gun but most of the time you're being payed to work on some project that has a pretty obvious route forward. The tyranny of the immediate rules here. Company Leadership: A wash but better now. Source Code: Plenty of that. And open source is being embraced more and more every day. Benefits: Nice salary. The yearly company performance raise has been beating inflation. The health insurance is good but it's now a capitalist ploy. There's a bunch of stuff they pay for that I'd rather have money for instead. The retirement is kind of hilariously weak but that's the trend everywhere I think. Free Soft Drinks: I'm a curmudgeon. I don't like my "overhead" subsidizing others' pathway to diabetes but whatever. Work Life Balance: You have to fight for this. And I mean really fight. You basically have to be willing to lose your job. But if you stick to your guns and find the right place, you can achieve this. Microsoft is Not Evil: Oh, they probably are. But so are most the places you all work for too. Influence: I integrate tools into games, which really overall isn't that important. That's also how I maintain my "Work Life Balance."
- jacalata 11y ago
  I quit earlier this year and the unreality is huge. I cringed every time minimum wage came up for the last year or more because of the libertarian "they should just get better jobs!" crap that followed, or explanations of how people on low incomes are really making a ton of money off welfare payments. More work-specifically, I was constantly arguing over design decisions that treated bandwidth and connectivity as unlimited. I was in a meeting where someone suggested that since everyone in the room knew how x worked, we could assume it was general knowledge. Some of these people walked out of college 5 or 20 years ago straight into a job making six figures in Redmond, and that's not just all they know, its all they care about. Also, I agree with his whole section on managers. In my six years there, I officially had maybe 15 managers? Four of them were great and if I went back, it would probably be under one of them. It wouldn't be worth the risk to go back and work for a new manager unless they came highly recommended by a friend. The personality cult effect is still real - I'm even doing it myslef above, but for a high level example look at the people who have followed Terry Myerson for years. I'm not sure I see this as negatively as he does - a good manager is hugely important in making the job worth having, so once you find one, you try and stay with them if it works for you.

92 points by luu 11y ago

serve_yay 11y ago

When was this written?

dsmitchell1 11y ago
It appears to be 2004. He indicates that he was hired in 1999, and elsewhere he talks about the number of managers he's had in five years.
- TheOtherHobbes 11y ago
  The resume shows he moved to Yahoo in 2007, then Amazon, then went independent. I wonder what a similar post would say about Microsoft today.
- sctb 11y ago
  Thanks, we've updated the title.
- serve_yay 11y ago
  Well. I may not have any inside info but I'd wager that 2004 MS and 2015 MS are very different workplaces indeed.
  - markjbrown 11y ago
    They are/were. I worked there from Feb 2000 until Dec 2014. The company changed a great deal over that time. Without commenting directly on Ballmer I will say Satya Nadella is a great CEO and he is doing a great job transforming the company.
    - MichaelGG 11y ago
      Hopefully he will take responsibility for cleaning up the app store and stop focusing on app count. I wrote Satya, the GM of the Windows Store, and various PMs on that team, but nothing. Countless tons of crap on the store. MS paying for shovelware. CSRs defending fake versions of Dropbox. Fake Windows Updates on the store. Publishers pretending to be Microsoft or other big vendors. Smaller ISVs unable to get scam versions of their software removed. Hell, even Netflix had s tough time getting rid of fake Netflix apps.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
Plough_Jogger 11y ago
First cached by the Internet Archive in Feb. 2005 https://web.archive.org/web/20050208021807/http://www.qbrundage.com/michaelb/pubs/essays/working_at_microsoft.html https://web.archive.org/web/20050208021807/http://www.qbrund...

cryowaffle 11y ago

All blogs should be required to have datestamps! :)

jjcm 11y ago

Since this blog is a bit dated, here are some things that have changed in the last 10 years from the perspective of someone who works here now. First some background to fill in the time between when he wrote this and now: When Vista dropped, public opinion of Microsoft started to go out the door. That was right around the same time that Apple released its first iphone (2007), and with a failed OS and a hugely successful device release by Apple, Microsoft fell by the wayside. Public opinion tanked a bit, and it seemed like the only "positive" energy was Steve Ballmer. Whether or not you can call his energy "positive" is debatable, but he was certainly energetic. Few employees actually liked Ballmer though, so when Satya came on it was a breath of fresh air. Satya came in at an absolutely perfect time - hololens and windows 10 were just about to be announced, meaning he'd get immense credit despite only being here for a short period. With a new CEO, Hololens, and Win10 on the horizon, public opinion (and our stock price) of MS has started to go up. The corporate culture in the last year has changed drastically, and support for open source internally has shot up (which as someone with a linux/unix background has really made me happy). Four or Five years ago, if you'd asked me what tech company I worked for, my answer would have probably been, "Microsoft, I know, it's a bummer. I'm trying to move to google". Now though people actually think MS is cool again. The stuff we're working on is exciting and the corporate culture is starting to get healthy.

vidoc 11y ago
Was stack ranking already common practice when this article was written (2004) and is it actually over now (2015) ?
- RyJones 11y ago
  stack ranking had been going on for many review cycles at this point and I heard last night that it's gone for good (wink wink, nudge nudge) because they still have to allocate bonuses and stock.
tdicola 11y ago
Err, that's kinda greatly simplifying things. I'd say the last 10 years can be described as: - ~2005 to ~2009 was the Ray Ozzie era. Ozzie took over the role of Chief Software Architect from Bill Gates in 2006 and the company, internally and externally, was focused on very ambitious projects. Software 'architects' were common on every team and usually doing something the 'right' way trumped shipping quickly and iterating. There were lots of interesting ideas and cool tech, but turning that stuff into viable products and businesses proved to be difficult. - ~2009 to 2013 was the Steven Sinofsky era. Sinofsky took over as the head of the Windows division after Vista and helped recover with the Windows 7 release. His influence quickly spread and most of the company adopted his management structure (very strict separation of concerns between development, test, and product management). The role of software architect quickly disappeared (and Ray Ozzie left the company, leaving the CSA position to disappear entirely) and although research was still important it was definitely not the top priority. There was much less focus on building platforms, ideas, or other intangible things vs. shipping to customers in controlled and predictable ways. Post 2013 and Steve Ballmer stepping down I don't really know much since I left around that time.

VOYD 11y ago

It really depends on what product you land on, and what your career goals are. And you'd better have career goals, because if you don't you are looked down upon. Doesn't everyone want the CEO's jobs? It's still as hyper-competitive as ever, and to a certain degree, even more so since M$FT has invested in creating job centers around the world. Microsoft still employees more "temps" than FTEs, just saying.

bjwbell 11y ago

His page http://michaelbrundage.com/note/2005/05/15/xbox-360-emulator/ http://michaelbrundage.com/note/2005/05/15/xbox-360-emulator... gives a taste of the xbox emulator project. Now I want to learn so much more.

yulaow 11y ago

Any comments related to the situation in the branches of Microsoft around the world? (like Microsoft Uk, Ge, Fr, Br, It, etc... you understood) I have some friends in Microsoft Uk and they all talk really bad about the company, both in how it is managed and in the support they get from other members of the team. Just to say one of my friends got his access card only after two weeks and a usable laptop after 7 and only after receiving two or three that got infinite BSODs.

icefox 11y ago

> At Microsoft, I've had access to the source code for Halo 1 & 2, Internet Explorer, MDAC, MSXML, the .NET Frameworks and CLR, SQL Server, SQLXML, Virtual PC, Visual Studio, Windows, the Xbox and Xbox Live, and probably several other projects that I've forgotten about. Does it get better than this? This is horrible! Sure you get to see the internal stuff, but in 2004 you were also forbidden from looking at any open source software. So sure you could see a handful of software titles that you can list on your fingers, but the millions of other programs you couldn't. How can someone that says "I love source code. I love reading it, writing it, thinking about it." possibly have been happy about being walled off from the rest of the software world? The last section on influence was wrong in hindsight. Sure Microsoft had influence in the 90's, but if you joined them in 2004 I can hardly think of them as influential in the last decade. Incremental improvement with a lot of churn for churn sake.

axy108 11y ago
>you were also forbidden from looking at any open source software For work/internal use, but I'm pretty sure he kept using it in his free time.

elg0nz 11y ago

Well, it looks like he's back on Microsoft. https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaelb https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaelb

DubiousPusher 11y ago

My 2 cents working here. Focus: Yes, this place still is 100% about making software. Yes, sometimes the company still pushes hard for really stupid things. That's getting better. Unreality: I have no idea what he's talking about. Maybe upper management but everyone I work with is a real person with real financial concerns and life goals. I've had many conversations about poverty and its effects on people. Most people I talk to wonder how people making median salaries get by in the area. Personal Freedom: Yeah right. It's not like anyone's got you at the point of a gun but most of the time you're being payed to work on some project that has a pretty obvious route forward. The tyranny of the immediate rules here. Company Leadership: A wash but better now. Source Code: Plenty of that. And open source is being embraced more and more every day. Benefits: Nice salary. The yearly company performance raise has been beating inflation. The health insurance is good but it's now a capitalist ploy. There's a bunch of stuff they pay for that I'd rather have money for instead. The retirement is kind of hilariously weak but that's the trend everywhere I think. Free Soft Drinks: I'm a curmudgeon. I don't like my "overhead" subsidizing others' pathway to diabetes but whatever. Work Life Balance: You have to fight for this. And I mean really fight. You basically have to be willing to lose your job. But if you stick to your guns and find the right place, you can achieve this. Microsoft is Not Evil: Oh, they probably are. But so are most the places you all work for too. Influence: I integrate tools into games, which really overall isn't that important. That's also how I maintain my "Work Life Balance."

jacalata 11y ago
I quit earlier this year and the unreality is huge. I cringed every time minimum wage came up for the last year or more because of the libertarian "they should just get better jobs!" crap that followed, or explanations of how people on low incomes are really making a ton of money off welfare payments. More work-specifically, I was constantly arguing over design decisions that treated bandwidth and connectivity as unlimited. I was in a meeting where someone suggested that since everyone in the room knew how x worked, we could assume it was general knowledge. Some of these people walked out of college 5 or 20 years ago straight into a job making six figures in Redmond, and that's not just all they know, its all they care about. Also, I agree with his whole section on managers. In my six years there, I officially had maybe 15 managers? Four of them were great and if I went back, it would probably be under one of them. It wouldn't be worth the risk to go back and work for a new manager unless they came highly recommended by a friend. The personality cult effect is still real - I'm even doing it myslef above, but for a high level example look at the people who have followed Terry Myerson for years. I'm not sure I see this as negatively as he does - a good manager is hugely important in making the job worth having, so once you find one, you try and stay with them if it works for you.