
Working at Microsoft (2004) - luu
http://www.qbrundage.com/michaelb/pubs/essays/working_at_microsoft.html
======
jjcm
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.

~~~
nemo44x
I'm happy to hear the culture at your company has improved but I don't know if
Microsoft is considered "cool" \- or whatever that means.

Anyone who has been around long enough (and not really that long all things
considered) knows better than to ever trust Microsoft. Their whole model has
been, and always will be: "Embrace, extend, extinguish".

So Microsoft is opening some things up? They've had no choice as they are
being left behind more and more. They know the modern developer is not as
interested in an expensive IDE and MSDN account when there are many
alternatives. We are creating so much more software than before and the top
down model Microsoft sold has become niche after many years of dominance.

Any open project Microsoft gets involved in and any open standard they get
involved in should come with a warning label. Why? Because this is in their
DNA.

~~~
seanmcdirmid
Anyone who has been around long enough knows not to trust Google, Apple,
Facebook, Oracle, ... Microsoft is not uniquely untrustworthy when it comes to
big multi-faceted companies. As for DNA, I haven't seen any dodgy behavior in
the OSS area for 5+ years, and nothing like EEE since I started working here
in 2007.

~~~
arebop
No, Microsoft is a special case because they have always been at best amoral;
they have been a cutthroat, even malicious company. Recently they've softened
their behavior and image, but it's really a very recent shift and given their
past treachery it's hard to trust them.

These other companies may not always work together in harmony, but at least
they aren't preoccupied with extinguishing their competitors and dominating
("owning") their users.

~~~
dottrap
Microsoft is a special case, but not for that reason.

Microsoft is a special case because they had a zero-sum game/scorched Earth
mindset, and the ability to lose billions of dollars per year, indefinitely,
achieving it.

Microsoft was not content at allowing potential new ideas/technologies develop
which might grow the market and improve things because they saw everything as
a potential threat to their position. So they would do everything from trying
to poison the market, to pouring (losing) tons of money into competing
products, and sometimes just buying up companies and let it rot.

The very special part is as long as Windows and Office were cash cows, stock
holders weren't willing to lead a revolt for Microsoft losing billions on
everything else.

Not all companies are not scorched earth (SGI gave away serious resources to
Nvidia, Valve recently gave away their VR tech in the highly publicized
layoffs a few years ago).

Other companies might like to play scorched earth, but they don't have the
ability to piss away money like Microsoft. This is why Microsoft is a special
case.

Microsoft still has tons of cash and Windows/Office is still a cash cow. And
it is generally accepted that company culture is hard to change once
established (especially here on HN). This is why people with historical
context do not trust Microsoft, with good reason.

~~~
seanmcdirmid
So how was MSR part of a scorched earth strategy?

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DubiousPusher
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
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.

~~~
DubiousPusher
That's fair. I guess I'm just lucky in the people I've found to work with.
Most seem pretty socially conscious and well aware of how lucky they are to be
where they are.

I accidentally skipped the "managers" section. And I completely agree. Of the
5 teams I've worked on there, I've only had one truly great manager and he was
a recent hire from outside.

This is especially frustrating for me as a junior engineer. Microsoft has
utterly failed to help develop not just myself as a young engineer but most
the young people hired with me. What is more, most teams barely take
experience into account at all. I've always felt as though I'm expected to
operate at the same level as people with 20 years of industry experience.

------
icefox
> 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
>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
Well, it looks like he's back on Microsoft.
[https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaelb](https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaelb)

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bjwbell
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.

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yulaow
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.

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VOYD
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.

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serve_yay
When was this written?

~~~
dsmitchell1
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.

~~~
serve_yay
Well. I may not have any inside info but I'd wager that 2004 MS and 2015 MS
are very different workplaces indeed.

~~~
markjbrown
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
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.

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cryowaffle
All blogs should be required to have datestamps! :)

