
What I gained, lost and learned while working for Microsoft - newnoobpl
https://medium.com/@alicjaes/saying-goodbye-to-microsoft-bb5db8662656
======
DoreenMichele
In many ways, the piece is basically a story about someone young and naive
becoming an adult, so to speak. That process gets conflated with "working for
Microsoft."

I'm a former military wife. The military does a lot of moving around. Affairs
are common when spouses are separated. Etc.

So that kind of thing is hardly something peculiar to Microsoft.

It also sounds like she is European and speaks English as a second language.
So going to Seattle for a while was possibly a case of culture shock. That
also shouldn't be attributed to Microsoft per se.

I spent most of my early life in the city I was born in. The first new place I
moved as an adult was a horrendous shock. It was trial by fire and I was so,
so miserable and I hated that place. I blamed that place.

It took me years to realize that place actually treated me pretty well and the
real problem was the shock of leaving everything I had ever known, so I would
have been miserable anywhere. It wasn't the place per se.

She seems to make an effort to not be too blamey of Microsoft and to express
her gratitude for the good parts, but the framing really fails to be
evenhanded about this. Starting with the title, it attributes a very ordinary
growing up experience to becoming disillusioned with this one company.

~~~
hamburglar
Seems to me it's a story about someone who's too impressed with a lot of
superficial stuff. The appearance of a "perfect life", business travel,
expensive hotels, uber rides (?), overpriced seattle apartments with a great
view that you can't actually afford, etc. The irony is that these things are
all rather unimpressive to those that actually have them within reach, so
citing them as evidence of your lavish lifestyle tends to mean _you don 't
actually have one_.

~~~
jpatokal
It's all relative. I spent six years at university without ever taking a
single taxi and I still consider Uber rides a luxury, because I can also take
the bus for a quarter of the price or bike for free.

Also, as the OP mentions, the trap of getting used to nice things is that
while you soon stop appreciating them, you will feel their loss quite
painfully.

~~~
hamburglar
There's a huge difference between a luxury and something that indicates you
have achieved a lavish and impressive lifestyle. A cup of coffee at starbucks
is a luxury.

~~~
phs318u
Off topic warning.

> A cup of coffee are starbucks is a luxury.

In Melbourne, Australia a coffee at Starbucks is considered:

1\. A sign that you’re a tourist.

2\. A sign that you’re a masochist.

3\. A cry for help.

4\. All of the above.

Sorry, I couldn’t help myself :)

~~~
enedil
Care to explain?

~~~
phs318u
A joke in poor taste. Melbournians are notorious coffee snobs. As jpatokal
said, locals wouldn’t be caught dead in a Starbucks. Basically if the cup is
taller than 4 fingers 8-10cm or the ingredients include anything other than
coffee, water and milk, or it was made by percolating - then it’s not coffee
as far as we’re concerned. It’s either dishwater or a confection of some sort.
It may be a fact that Melbourne has more coffee shops per capita than any
other place on earth.

~~~
js2
Those rules seem to eliminate both Turkish and Cuban coffee. That would be a
shame.

~~~
phs318u
Yeah, sorry - a modicum of sugar is allowed :)

(I love my Saturday morning Turkish)

------
devinmcafee
I think many young people in tech learn this lesson the hard way. They get
excited with all the free food, laundry services, and events that tech jobs
offer. They end up spending all of their waking hours at work and work becomes
an identity. Then one day something changes and they realize they spent the
last N years of their life at work, not building real lasting relationships,
pursuing hobbies, dating, etc. It truly is a cautionary tale and startups and
big companies alike want their employees to drink the Kool Aid.

Personally, I love all the perks tech jobs offer but work-life balance always
comes first.

~~~
yuy910616
I think a lot of people learn this the hard way, yes. But I kinda don't see
what is wrong with this. Having work life balance is somewhat of a luxury, and
it's a luxury to be able to say "money doesn't make me happy". It's a luxury
to come to that conclusion.

How do you arrive at that conclusion without going through the ringer first?

~~~
taneq
> Having work life balance is somewhat of a luxury, and it's a luxury to be
> able to say "money doesn't make me happy". It's a luxury to come to that
> conclusion.

Exactly. Any time anyone says "money doesn't make me happy" what they really
mean is "I already have enough money that it's no longer the limiting factor
in my happiness."

The vast majority of peoples' lives and happiness could be markedly improved
by giving them more money.

~~~
AmericanChopper
I think this is unnecessarily cynical. I’ve been through multiple periods of
both success and extreme hardship in my life. I can confidently say that money
doesn’t make me happy, because I’ve managed to be happy at my lowest points of
financial stability. If losing financial stability robs somebody of all their
happiness, then I’d say they should question whether they were really happy to
begin with, or just comfortable. But to say that anybody who has financial
stability can’t say ‘money doesn’t make me happy’ denies the possibility that
they’ve lived experiences that genuinely brought them to that conclusion.

~~~
specialist
I've gone long stretches unemployed because of chronic health issues.

Money helps reduce anxiety. Health insurance even more so.

Once you have responsibilities, mouths to feed, it's no longer just about you.
Now that I'm an empty nester, I care about money a lot less. I'm practically
happy-go-lucky.

------
throwaway713
Reading articles like this always makes me wonder where all this crazy drama
is going on. I work at one of FAANG, and I go in each day, code/analyze things
from 8-5, chat with some people about their cycling or cooking hobbies, then
go home. If people are having affairs and flying to resorts, then I'm just
totally oblivious to it. Either that, or I'm the most boring 28 year old that
works there.

~~~
bsder
> Either that, or I'm the most boring 28 year old that works there.

You are, presumably, male and doing technical tasks.

It's much easier to get into drama when you are a 1) young female, whom _lots_
of people want to interact with, hired to do 2) marketing, where your _job_ is
to be extremely social with semi-strangers.

This is simply the way of the world.

~~~
johntiger1
Spot on, different roles and different "reasons" let's say

------
jondubois
I've worked for both startups and corporations. Corporate jobs are soul-
crushing because everything about the environment seems to hinder you from
producing real value and from learning new useful things. Corporate jobs hurt
your inner creator and they destroy your sense of pragmatism.

Most of the stuff you learn in corporations are anti-patterns that you have to
unlearn after you leave.

The reason why corporate jobs feel so meaningless is because most tech
corporations have had a long term monopoly over their respective markets. They
haven't had to really struggle on the market for several decades in some
cases... Inside a corporation, mediocrity is the definition of success. If
employees can produce something mediocre that only just works, it will
translate into disproportionate revenue gains due to centralizing and
monopolistic market forces. I think that this is what is meant when people
talk about the "golden cage".

That's why I try to avoid corporate jobs. They pay well and you do learn some
stuff in the first few months but after that your skills start degenerating
and a lot of people don't notice it when it happens to them; then they get
stuck in that job (or other corporate jobs) because no efficient company
exposed to normal market forces will hire them.

Also note that the definition of 'normal market forces' is relative. Most
startups which don't go through the normal corporation-controlled VC funnel
(e.g. bootstraped startups) have a really tough time working against
centralizing and monopolizing market forces.

~~~
specialist
I think about the case study of Borland's Quattro Pro a lot.

TLDR: There's a core group that "get's it". Per Pareto and organizational
psychology, most people have no idea what's going on.

The initial Quattro Pro team was just 4 people. They all had prior experience.
Were colleagues who worked well together. They had management meat shields who
fought off the rest of the org, so the core team had enough time and space to
finish a thought uninterrupted. As the product progressed, the "surface area"
increased, they brought in people to help.

None of my corporate jobs have been like that. They've mostly felt like a
"choose your own adventure" games, where you wander around asking NPCs for
help to accomplish the latest quest, hopefully finishing before someone gives
the ant farm another good shake.

------
fc373745
I really don't know why I read what I just read.

There's a lot of red flags - going to clubs, going to burning man, having an
affair, renting a penthouse apartment in freaking Seattle.

I'm not passing judgement on those who wanna live life to the fullest, but the
failure of achieving the white picketed fence type of life she originally
wanted to live is totally on her and not on Microsoft at all.

~~~
chris_wot
This comment is close to how I feel. Whilst things happened that weren’t
great, some self reflection on her own behaviour might be worthwhile.

I say this as someone who was once in this situation.

~~~
Yhippa
There are always good reasons why people decide to do things the way they do.
At some point in people's lives there come times where you have to make a
decision and learn that there are consequences for it.

I think I didn't have much to compare to in my 20's (like social media posts)
so I made plenty of bad decisions in my life. I was lucky to survive, learn,
and calibrate my decision making process.

I'm glad you came out okay. It seems that the auther of this post may not
learn or is possibly susceptible to being in this same situation again.

------
ljiljana
> A few guys working both for Microsoft and Partners were treating me like a
> cute puppy or telling me they wanted to have sex with me while drunk, but
> all of it seemed minor and acceptable — I was getting so much in return.

jesus, how is this minor and acceptable? i'm a woman in engineering and I can
not even imagine having to deal with something like this. Is it that Marketing
is that much different? Or am I just lucky to be working with human beings?

~~~
jldugger
> jesus, how is this minor and acceptable?

I suspect working in an Eastern Europe satellite office far more regressive
than your typical US west coast office. Not that it makes it either minor or
acceptable, just... different.

~~~
idlewords
My cousin works in tech in Poland and I get the impression from her that
workplace culture is changing rapidly to a more "international" style where
this kind of behavior is not acceptable. Then again, she may not tell me the
worst stuff.

I would love to hear from people on the ground about their experience, and
whether that's true across other tech workplaces in central and eastern
europe.

------
8f2ab37a-ed6c
Similar exit experience. I left to go to graduate school and my skip level (a
MS lifer), who was a mentor and a role model for me, with whom I had regular
meetings for years, didn't even say goodbye, he pretended he didn't see me
while walking past me down the hallways. It was a serious breach of company
loyalty in his mind. Ironically a few months later he was out himself working
at a different company, as the project we were on was panning out poorly and
people started to jump ship. I don't miss it there.

Like the OP said, I'm sure there are plenty of great teams at the company, and
you can still have long, fulfilling employment there, but I could never relate
to that experience.

------
PorterDuff
Lots of fuss and fury about what is basically just another large company.
They're not your friends and never will be. Dunno why there's so much surprise
here, I guess it's just another youngster hitting the immovable object of the
working world.

A friend of mine who went and got a job at Microsoft (a rarity in my circle,
they don't seem to be heavyweights in the graphics or video world) and made a
smart move. His deal was they he got the job but that he didn't go through any
kind of interview rigmarole. The gig didn't last forever but at least someone
was spared a bit of craziness.

~~~
pinewurst
The Microsoft interview experience remains awful, Satya or not. I’ve tried a
few times but with one exception I was treated like dirt every time by
recruiters and interviewers.

(Edit) One interviewer blew cigarette smoke in my face, for example. That’s
not to say that there aren’t plenty of decent people there.

~~~
FlorianRappl
I interviewed with most of the "tech giants" and Microsoft's process was by
far the best (professional and down-to-earth). Maybe this was due to the
target (language team), maybe due to the location (Redmond), but at least with
me they left a great impression.

~~~
ido
I think it really depends on the individuals you interview with. I've been
through Google's supposedly infamous interview process and had a very positive
experience (even tho I didn't get an offer).

------
noego
It felt like the key parts of the story were being left out here.

From her telling, it sounds like everything was going well for her in Poland.
Then she did a very short stint in Seattle where everyone was _" extremely
closed minded... only caring about their manager’s approval"_. I'm not sure
what that even means, but it sounds like that triggered in her a major
depression. After which she spent a lot of time "pretending to work", which
eventually resulted in her being fired. Clearly something major happened in
Seattle, but we have no idea what.

Is there anything that MS could have done differently here, to avoid the
problems she ran into? Or is this just a case of her investing too much time
into her career and burning herself out?

~~~
abhi152
She never said she was very good at what she did. Yes, she was working like
crazy but that is a different thing. Being overly invested in career mostly
makes you very good at what you do.

------
KingMachiavelli
> One of the first things I noticed is that almost everyone working for
> Microsoft had this perfect life???a spouse, kids, nice houses, good cars.

I'm continually surprised how often this kind of life is considered 'perfect'.
Every item in this list adds more liability and commitment to your life which
is something very few 20-somethings (including myself) have enough experience
with to handle it let alone know it's what they enjoy.

Beyond financial security, investing time in what you actually want to do with
your life and your own hobbies is going to be much more rewarding and
important than nice cars and houses. Even kids can become just another status
symbol intended to virtue signal to your class appropriate 'friends' that
years latter downgrade to just peers and colleagues.

> Huge campus, nice cafeterias, woods, a pond, overwhelming space. Everything
> seemed great....

Ugh, this trend to make work environments indistinguishable from a university
campus is just the latest trend to warm up new employees until their fully
committed to the boiling sewage that is a life that is all work and ass
kissing. You only have to remember that FAAMNGS are committed to their
shareholders to know that for every dollar invested in their campus, they need
two back from you.

~~~
rgoulter
> You only have to remember that FAAMNGS are committed to their shareholders

By committing only to shareholders, they miss out on other stakeholders:
employees, suppliers, customers, community. (Jonathan Haidt discusses at 18:50
onwards in this video:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iOu_8yoqZoQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iOu_8yoqZoQ)
When the company emphasises only shareholders, they miss out on building
cooperative relationships with the other stakeholders).

~~~
KingMachiavelli
I say that meaning their fiduciary responsibility is to their shareholders.
Their other stakeholders are by nature secondary. I'll have to check that
video out but unless the shareholders themselves vote to prioritize employees
and others above profit, the company and, more directly, upper management
risks lawsuits and loosing their own lucrative positions.

~~~
skybrian
Not a lawyer but it seems like in practice, the fiduciary responsibility thing
seems like more of an ideology that some people buy into than a legal
constraint? Management can choose to do all sorts of crazy things and argue
that it's in the company's best interest. (But also read Matt Levine on how
everything bad is also securities fraud.)

The thing that really aligns employee incentives with shareholders is
restricted stock and options. Employees directly benefit when the stock goes
up, so of course it creates a culture where most people want it to go up and
aren't happy when it goes down.

~~~
Gibbon1
It's not an ideology it's an excuse for board members and CEO to do what they
want without being called on it. Namely loot the company.

The guys in the mahogany suite say look the only people we are responsible to
are the stockholders. Who most of them it turns out have very little coherent
control. That's very convenient.

------
29athrowaway
Work is trading money for time. Some will offer more time (show up earlier, go
home late), others less time.

With your time, you can make small contributions or large contributions: a
high quality decision that saves time or money, close a big deal, an efficient
and reusable process/abstraction that saves effort, recruit the right person
for the right job...

Or you can be counterproductive: have redundant meetings, waste people's
attention, be toxic and make people feel like shit and less productive or
engaged with their job, be closed minded and waste valuable opportunities,
create a shitty abstraction that people's wastes time and makes people feel
frustrated, recruit a jerk, interrupt someone that is about to say something
important.

What you do with your time can be vastly more important than how many hours
you work.

------
kerng
I'm not sure what to make of this post.

3.5 years of which 2 years or so are in dedicated program to rotate jobs
across the world seems like an amazing deal to kick off a career many would
dream of. Not much responsibility but a lot to learn and observe!

More objectively reflecting ones own performance and actions might good to
understand reasons for what happened.

This is business and work, not family and friends. I see a lot of younger
people struggling to make that distinction.

~~~
danmaz74
The point IMHO was that this business and work swallowed up all time from
family and friendships.

~~~
kerng
If one chooses a career that requires travel or is in a foreign country
altogether while your family & life long friends are at home - maybe the
initial decision to accept the job is to blame and not the job or the company?
In my experience finding close friends later in life is more difficult
compared to childhood, teenage and college years.

------
andersonmvd
I am dumb or everyone is missing the point in their comments.

It's not about disillusion or work-life balance. It's about how smart people
go into submission of the corporate b.s. so quickly and for so long. You can
count on your fingers, if you actually know, a place where you can work and
derive from it your own fulfillment and generate a real impact to real human
beings.

People get lost along the way, put money first and use politics as a mean to
get that. That's the cause of all shitty jobs you may have and all shitty
services you have as a consumer. This capitalism overfitting. There is no real
mission behind people, except for the cold hard hash or power over other
humans.

I invite you to think, even for a minute, about this statement written on
Simon Sinek's website: "Imagine a world in which the vast majority of us wake
up inspired, feel safe at work and return home fulfilled at the end of the
day."

How come this statement is simply reversed nowadays AND people don't make an
effort to change it. Holy Moly ...

~~~
Cardinal_
People are animals before they are humans and life is a battle for survival.
Money and sex always come before morals and values. Classic red pill vs blue
pill and hardest lesson I ever had to learn.

------
Roritharr
I find her story fascinating as many glimpses into big corporates are for me.

I've spent my 20s constantly oscillating between going broke trying to build a
scalable startup and earning good money by working freelance. I was breaking
my back getting things off the ground but also managing the freelancing
projects, the effort left little place for holidays/friends or parties. I
basically never went to conferences as it was either way to expensive or time
that could be potentially billable.

After realising how toxic my lifestyle focused on "making it" had become I
decided to join a profitable SaaS company that needed my skills to build a
future proof software platform out of their legacy system.

Now at 31 I've got a good position in that company with a good chunk of stock
options, I'm awaiting my second son.

Reading her story to me makes me wonder how much I've missed, just finishing
University and applying to a large tech company might have been equally
backbreaking, but at least I would have seen more of the world, networked more
and maybe ended up with some usable savings to show for it. Typical greener-
grass situation I guess.

~~~
apatters
> I've spent my 20s constantly oscillating between going broke trying to build
> a scalable startup and earning good money by working freelance.

I think the "scalable startup" fixation is the worst legacy of our industry.

There has always been an enormous professional world of people in many fields
start either a solo consultancy or an agency/firm/practice and by their 40s
they are paying themselves somewhere in the six figures.

"Will it scale" in the VC sense is not one of their concerns. They still get
rich.

------
neilv
College students are falling all over themselves, learning each FAANG's
interview process, drilling large numbers of problems for the whiteboard
tests/hazings, being frontloaded with a bunch of VC dogma about startups,
learning lousy frameworks before they have to, etc. But I'm not sure they have
much idea what industry and particular companies are actually like.

~~~
davidivadavid
That's because big tech companies are the new IB/MC. You see the same types of
behaviors there.

~~~
neilv
I've been wondering that, and there's evidence.

Tech does still get traditional nerds, who'd do CS even if there was no money
in it.

But I wonder how many of the traditional nerds are choosing other STEM fields
partly because of the perception of current CS jobs.

------
Uptrenda
There is definitely a lot of cautionary tales here. I especially relate to the
working 24/7 part ;). You'll see the same problem with offers that require you
to go to other countries to work. If you're a young person you'll probably
think its an amazing opportunity and want to go straight away. But the reality
is from the moment you touch down, to the moment you leave, the company
basically owns you.

If you think separating work and life is hard now try doing it when a company
is directly paying for the place you go to sleep. No space or time will really
be "yours" in any sense. They'll virtually know where you are at all times and
be paying for you to be there. Hence, its strongly implied you live and
breathe for the company.

Btw, I'm not saying people shouldn't do this. It can honestly be a really fun
and motivating environment. But the trade-offs are something to keep in mind
when accepting offers that seem too good to be true. I've found that
constantly traveling and spending all your time working is super unproductive
for me. All it leads to is burn-out and I usually end up doing far more when
I'm happy, healthy, and in control of my own life.

Remote positions are god-tier for this. It's hard to beat being able to lie in
bed writing code for something you love. I'll take that over other perks any
day. Also, side note. It's always depressing reading about the sexism that
women have to face in tech. If you're a women dealing with this at the moment
I hope you continue to flourish and don't let stupid remarks get to you. Not
everybody acts like this

------
kerng
What I would recommend to everyone in their 20s is to get a mentor who has
been in the workforce for 30-40+ years.

You will learn and hear invaluable stories on how companies treat employees,
how firing works, how being fired is and generally just meaningful information
that will put your own present misery into perspective and prepare you for the
things to come.

~~~
scarface74
I’ve been in the workforce over 20 years, and I can barely relate to someone
just starting out:

\- I have no idea what is expected from a junior developer starting out in the
workplace. I was self taught before going to college and my first job I was
the sole developer writing a decently complicated networked data entry system.
What should I expect the typical junior developer to know? I’ve only worked at
companies who don’t hire junior developers.

\- If someone’s dreams and aspirations are to “work for Big N” (the
stereotypical r/cscareerquestions poster), what do I know? I’ve never studied
leetCode/“Cracking the Code” in my life and don’t plan to.

\- I’m not sure someone who has been in the industry 30-40 years will be able
to relate to someone just starting off. Things are different now. Things are
different from when I first started. Technology was just another decent
paying, middle class career field when I entered it.

Someone in the industry 30-40 years is probably a company man and still
believes in company loyalty.

~~~
kerng
Well, as a start you should share exactly what you are writing here. You dont
have to tell young people what they should or should not do - just how things
evolved throughout your career and how companies you worked for evolved
(mergers, acquisition, crazy reorgs,..) and things like that. Invaluable
stories I always appreciate to hear from more experienced people.

EDIT: and that you dont care about leetcode probably also says something about
how important that stuff is in the grand scheme of things :)

~~~
scarface74
I’m much better at advising people who have been in the industry for 8+ years
who want to stay active, hands on developers about how not to get stuck in
“expert beginner” mode (been there done that), how to stay relevant, and how
to exercise “soft power” without going into management.

But as far as your edit....

ME: I’ll never spend a year of my life grinding at leetCode to work at a FAANG

ALSO ME: I’m going to spend three years of my life grinding through all things
AWS so I can work as an SA at Amazon (or a partner).

------
mathattack
Yes a lot of big companies are like that. Everyone’s friends, but when your
time is done, it’s done. In many cases like this one people are conditioned to
push through bad situations, and the company does a favor by terminating the
relationship.

~~~
rdiddly
Absolutely. If you're thinking about quitting, but keep putting it off, and
they end it instead, they've done you a couple of favors:

1) They supply all the initiative you can't muster.

2) Having been _involuntarily_ terminated, you can usually collect
unemployment if need be, and sometimes a severance package.

If even, say half, of your emotions about it consist of relief, it was the
right thing; it needed to happen.

------
oneepic
Wow, seems like most of the comments here are just blaming the author, trying
to find all the flaws with her story, or dropping truth bombs about big
companies and jobs in our society ("coworkers aren't your friends", etc). I
still think it was a worthwhile read for me, since I'm about to start working
at MS next month. Good to be aware of stuff so I can keep an eye out for it,
and try to make things better.

~~~
ido
I agree that it's good to be aware of & I enjoyed the read. But honestly it
would have "prepared" you just as well if you were starting at amazon or
google - there was nothing MS specific about the experience.

------
marcoperaza
I worked for two years at Microsoft, and I saw nothing like this. Maybe the
most telling part of this post is where she says many people had (she says
fake) pleasant lives, presumably the same people she criticizes for being
“closed-minded”, apparently for being focused on delivering for their manager.

It was a no-drama workplace full of great people who come in to work every day
to do their job well and then go home and do what people are supposed to do,
build a fulfilling family life. And if anyone had a disastrous personal life,
it certainly wasn’t something they brought into the office.

I left Microsoft because I wanted to go a totally different direction with my
career (I’m in law school now), but it really was a delightful place to work
full of great people.

------
pixelrevision
I think the hardest part for me to think about when I read these articles is
that this is an industry with a purpose of making quality of life better for
people. If the people involved in designing these products can’t figure out
how to make a 40 hour work week work or be compassionate to their coworkers
what kind of expectations are going to start slipping into their products?

I do get that right now that a modern tech company is competing under “winner
take all” scenarios so this stuff is hard to avoid. But it really does seem
like we need to stop and reflect a bit on what the importance is of the things
we are building.

------
syntaxing
I always thought Microsoft was one of the tech companies with the best work
life balance. Is this not the case? Is it because of the gender
disparity/sexism? Can any share some insight how it's to work for MS in
Mountain View? Is it a bad idea for someone starting a family?

~~~
kerng
Microsoft is probably one of the best options you can pick if you want to have
great WLB but still do worldwide impactful work - and majority of teams have
good culture and are fun. At least that's the vibe I get from friends that
work there.

~~~
cleandreams
I got a job at Microsoft through acquisition (not located in Redmond) and I
gotta say, I am kinda loving it. Very challenging and good tools. Happy to be
here. I think the Satya era is an improvement, from what I hear. To me they
seem pretty serious about being a good environment for women.

------
netwanderer3
Went through a similar experience like hers many years ago working for a
consulting company. In big corporations, it sometimes feels like there are
many little smaller companies within. Often they have very distinctive and
rigid cultures which could make one feel like you're just a cog in the system,
and because they are so big it's difficult to make any significant individual
contributions that could generate real impacts. You either fit in or you
don't. Besides, the corporate culture is usually being dictated and passed
down from higher level management executives who are not really involved in
your office day-to-day so it could feel a little foreign at times.

I used to work at a big oil company where its culture was obsessed with safety
and they took it very seriously. It's actually a good thing and I get it if
you're one of the workers at an oil extraction site because those jobs could
be very dangerous. However, we were just the business operation team working
in an office located deep inside the city. We still had to follow the same
corporate culture and rituals about safety, so without fail every week we had
to conduct meeting where team members would discuss various topics related to
safety. Since none of us has actually ever worked down at the oil fields, we
slowly ran out of topics over time and people started telling random stories
like tripping on electrical wires, spilling hot coffee while they were
driving, etc... I think it's such a perfect example of how some passed down
cultures could feel a bit foreign at times, depending on which unit or team
you belong to. Great company though!

------
maximus1983
This sounds like I was like about 10 years ago. Wrapped up in a company. I
don't do "work friends" anymore.

~~~
wolco
Work friends one on one outside of work are fine but avoid the group social.
Anyone part of that will drop you because your connection is the social.

------
7373737373
I wonder what OP thinks about this:
[https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-
principle-...](https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-or-
the-office-according-to-the-office/)

------
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negamax
It's strange to see this story on HN (I read the post). If anything, this
shows HN's bias against MS. If there was no MS, it would still have panned out
in similar fashion. Young person's first job, leaving home and relationships,
realizing there's more to life. There was no reason to mention MS

------
HNLurker2
Be thankful with what you got. Looking back and ruminating on my failures and
my bad actions that make me overlook opportunities (like joining coding
competitions because somehow my mother managed to get me a free teacher) and
being an unthankful stupid kid with many perks and ways to succeed but failed

------
justinclift
Hmmm, there's no mention of burn-out in the article, but it sounds a lot like
that was involved too.

eg too much time focused on one thing ("overdose" on it) -> burn out -> lack
of motivation/focus -> needs 5 week (or more) break to gain perspective. (etc)

------
temp99990
I’ve worked at the stereotypical big SF tech co and agree not everyone can
thrive at that kind of place...including me. I can’t drink the koolaid and I
don’t like feeling like I have to fake excitement to fit in.

------
lazyant
I'm curious about what she means by "community leaders", who are these people,
like software influencers or famous conference speakers?

------
purplezooey
"...focusing on politics, I would do great there". The story of too many
workplaces.

------
scottmsul
Reading it I can't really sympathize with the author too much. Having affairs
doesn't speak much to her character. Neither does staying home and pretending
to be on Skype.

Because of that I'm somewhat skeptical of some of her claims. For example:

>The people I worked with were extremely closed minded. Most of them with many
years of experience working in a corporation, so even more closed minded, only
caring about their manager’s approval.

If these co-workers or managers could share their side, what would they say?
Your manager is the one giving your performance reviews, bonuses, promotions,
etc. If you worked hard to deliver good results, could that be interpreted as
"sucking up to your boss?"

~~~
wanderer2323
>If these co-workers or managers could share their side, what would they say?

Can't agree with this more. The Seattle bit feels incomplete, there was
something there that I'd tentatively describe as 'culture shock' or 'cognitive
dissonance event' and I really really wonder what would the 'seattle co-
workers' say about this piece.

------
stevebmark
I'm not sure what the takeaways are from this article, if anything concrete.
It sounds sad and frustrating that some supposed friends inside the company
didn't say goodbye when she was let go, but I guess I don't see that as
surprising or noteworthy at a large company. Maybe there's a warning sign to
not go all-in on a company, but she doesn't sound remorseful for having done
it? I hope she finds satisfying and balancing work in the future.

~~~
0x8BADF00D
The key takeaway is to be wary of cognitive dissonance. She just casually got
into an affair at the office, while claiming to want to build a relationship
with her existing boyfriend, for example.

~~~
wolco
The key part was when she called everyone at Richman fake then said proceeded
to tell us she was pretending to be nice.

It sounds like others more experienced actual developerd wanted her job with
the perks. Microsoft wanted a different face, younger/well spoken/diverse
gender/etc. Because she drank the cool-aid she was able to do great at her job
without being a developer. The social aspects that supported her start
changing. Meanwhile Microsoft responds to the public outcry and makes everyone
like her learn to code and things aren't fun anymore. She quits and finds out
her support system is gone and thinks everyone is fake.

------
overgard
> _The people I worked with were extremely closed minded. Most of them with
> many years of experience working in a corporation, so even more closed
> minded, only caring about their manager’s approval. I was devastated. My
> team members were the most fake people I have met still to this day. I
> cannot even explain how terrible it was for me to have to help them, show
> interest and pretend that I support what they’re doing. You might be
> thinking — why weren’t you honest with them instead? I tried, but no one
> cared and my role was minimised, so at the end I was only doing a 1 Excel
> file._

In my experience when someone says everyone else is the problem, it’s more
likely they’re the problem but they lack the introspection to realise it. I
mean really which seems more likely, that everyone else was awful, or that
something she was doing rubbed people the wrong way? It sounds like Microsoft
was just a backdrop to a turbulent few years.

Also after cheating on her boyfriend and spending large periods of time faking
doing work (which I’m guessing contributed to her firing) her takeaway at the
end is.. to focus more on herself and blame Microsoft and her former coworkers
for her mistakes? How is that not just narcissism? I mean self care is
important, but maybe her takeaway should be to act with integrity..

~~~
codetrotter
I don’t know her, and I don’t anyone else from the story, but this part

> the most fake people I have met still to this day

followed immediately by

> I cannot even explain how terrible it was for me to have to help them, show
> interest and pretend that I support what they’re doing

Taken out of context at least, there is exactly one person that seems
exceptionally more fake than anyone else...

I dunno, maybe I have just been lucky to have sufficiently many sincere people
around me in my life, but if I perceive someone as being insincere I will
avoid those people — not stay around them and pretend that I like them.

Of course, if you perceive everyone at a place to be fake then you can’t
really avoid them.

I don’t know what to do in that situation really. But I agree that some
introspection would probably be in order. Though personally I have in the past
had the opposite problem — being overly harsh on myself and critical of
myself.

~~~
worik
Yuk. What a horrid pair of comments!

------
carmate383
This has nothing to do with Microsoft, and instead reads like a blog entry of
a narcissistic, selfish young lady. Good riddance.

~~~
panpanna
I think the crazy infighting along Microsoft teams is fairly well known at
this point.

Do you know of any recently successful teams that were not built up from
entirely new people isolated and protected from the old teams?

------
trpc
Welcome to capitalism, little bird.

~~~
lioeters
There's a truth to your quip, I think.

Phrases from the article that jumped out for me were: The real world will eat
you alive. Everyone was fake.

Much of that cruelty and superficiality arises from the dominant ideology
driving corporate culture. It can be tough and heart-breaking growing up in
such a world.

