
Why I joined Microsoft - sharjeelsayed
https://hackernoon.com/the-best-career-advice-ive-received-so-far-is-never-turn-down-an-interview-7586ca5b7ef8
======
gaius
_though I was getting daily emails from Microsoft recruiters_

Really? They were emailing every day? I call shenanigans, no-one wants to hire
ANYONE that badly...

 _I sat there with my jaw on the floor–for those of you who don’t know what
Cosmos DB is, it’s the first globally distributed, multi-model database
service for building planet scale apps_

Started doing the evangelism already I see! This whole blog post is just a PR
puff piece! That line is pretty much taken verbatim from the CosmosDB website
- "planet scale apps" indeed.

For those that were wondering what Developer Advocates do it's exactly this:
write blog posts as if they're just engineers like you, but rave about how
amazing their employers are.

FWIW I even like Microsoft, Azure is my cloud of choice, but this kind of
marketing activity is pretty condescending in my personal opinion. I like to
keep things on a pure engineering level, technical merits only, warts and all.

~~~
ensiferum
Yup exactly. The contents of the article can be summed:

"Look at me I'm so amazing that ppl want to recruit me daily! Look at
Microsoft it's so amazing! Our tech is amazing! We're so amazing."

~~~
gaius
In politics it's called astroturfing, i.e. fake grassroots.

------
VengefulCynic

      “There is no loyalty in business, Ashley.
      You’re a single mom. You have a family and you owe it to them to see this Microsoft interview through.”
    

A truth that is not repeated nearly often enough by employees.

~~~
analyst74
A company has no loyalty, but people you work with do.

~~~
matt_wulfeck
And that's often one of the biggest considerations you should make when
switching jobs. Your current coworkers will be by far your best job
connections in he future, so do them well by leaving gracefully.

------
nickpsecurity
Microsoft is such a huge corporation that it has many teams that act totally
opposite one another. Being in or dealing with any one can blind you to what
the overall company is like. It seems she's in one of the better groups.
Personally, I've always loved Microsoft Research specifically since they do
great stuff. Practical example: their driver, verification tool is the reason
it doesn't blue screen so much anymore. They did another OS (VerveOS) proven
safe down to assembly. Neat stuff. Then, there's the groups pushing garbage on
enterprises with plenty of lock-in. Then, there's also what I read where the
workers in many parts have a pretty stable job whose environment and structure
works out better than usual for women, people with families, or just those
wanting work/life balance Silicon Valley usually won't give them. The bigger
tech companies often rate better than startups and such on those points.

Overall, though, I think she's wrong about Microsoft changing. They're not.
They have patents, copyrights, and data/protocol lock-in guaranteeing billions
a year in profits for them. Changing would cost them much of that which will
_never happen_. Far as open-source, they've gotten over a billion dollars off
Android alone in patent royalties from their legal team despite doing
everything they could to eliminate Android in favor of Windows Phone.
Royalties not earned for sure. They did some Linux contributions to support
running it on their own hypervisor pursuing more lock-in at other levels. Even
many of the MS Research inventions are patented with who knows what risk. They
continue to pay off politicians to make things worse for the rest of us like
in U.S. w/ patent/copyright laws or Munich trying to uproot the FOSS
conversion. They're the same, evil company that's trying to adjust to a FOSS-
friendly world in a way that lets them suck money out of that too at
everyone's expense.

All that said, you can make an impact if you work at Microsoft on improving
one of their huge, legacy products. Or even a new one with a high-chance of
adoption. It might be a decent choice if aiming for the greater good. An easy
example would be anything stopping code injection in Windows systems would be
_great_ in terms of damage prevented for that user and anyone their box
DDOS'd. Reliability or integrity of data, too, as who wants to loose their
most critical files at the worst time. Definitely good to be done even if
they're evil. Just gotta determine if you want to do good for Microsoft's
customers or improve things that will keep people away from them.

------
atdt

      It turns out that Microsoft has the largest number of the top 500 Open Source projects for any one entity.
    

Top 500 according to whom / what?

~~~
dankohn1
In my measurement of the 30 highest velocity open source projects [0],
Microsoft has VS Code, .NET and Office Developer.

[0] [https://www.cncf.io/blog/2017/06/05/30-highest-velocity-
open...](https://www.cncf.io/blog/2017/06/05/30-highest-velocity-open-source-
projects/)

~~~
pjmlp
A few Haskell and OCaml researchers are also on MSR payroll.

They are also contribuing for Go on Windows and the main contributors for Go
tooling on VSCode.

------
RandyRanderson
Tl;DR Is one of the reasons job security? I bet it isn't.

2014 18k jobs - [https://www.wired.com/2014/07/microsoft-
layoffs/](https://www.wired.com/2014/07/microsoft-layoffs/)

2015 8k layoffs - [http://fortune.com/2015/07/08/microsoft-
layoffs/](http://fortune.com/2015/07/08/microsoft-layoffs/)

2016 3k - [http://fortune.com/2016/07/28/microsoft-layoffs-thousands-
ph...](http://fortune.com/2016/07/28/microsoft-layoffs-thousands-phone/)

2017 Q1 700 - [http://www.businessinsider.com/about-700-microsoft-
employees...](http://www.businessinsider.com/about-700-microsoft-employees-to-
be-laid-off-sources-say-2017-1)

2017 Q3 3k-5k [https://techcrunch.com/2017/07/06/microsoft-confirms-
layoff-...](https://techcrunch.com/2017/07/06/microsoft-confirms-layoff-
reports-reorganization-expected-to-impact-thousands/)

It's hard to tell if the numbers overlap. For context MS has about 100k
employees.

~~~
Markoff
yeah and those are only direct employees, i worked for Microsoft vendor and we
had ratio 1 Microsoft employee to 150 outsourced workers

project on our site shrinked from 150-200 at peak to 25-30 in the end

------
vosper
> Proud thinker. Avid creator. Devoted explorer. Incurable student. Humble
> Gopher. Principal Developer Advocate @Microsoft.

TL;DR, she's really taking the advocacy thing seriously: apparently Microsoft
is amazing (and there's a subtle digestion that Pivotal doesn't pay as well,
and maybe isn't a interesting)

~~~
haskellandchill
Pivotal doesn't pay well but it can be plenty interesting.

------
43224gg252
"Because they hired me".

------
rdtsc
> As a Developer Advocate, you’re spreading awareness and enabling developers
> to do what they love; write, code, and learn.

Can someone explain that some more how that position is supposed to work.
Maybe an example where DA made an impact for them personally. Otherwise that
description sounds a bit like a rename of the traditional HR department.

~~~
ocdtrekkie
I don't understand how you view Developer Advocates like HR. Developer
Advocates work with external developers using and building on your platforms.
Wholly different skill set, nothing to do with employee management.

~~~
vxNsr
The confusion stems around the word "developer" OP is thinking of internal
devs, while the role is actually about interfacing with outside devs who will
be using/extending products and services the org makes. It's an easy mistake
to make if you don't give it too much thought because there's no inherent
explanation in "Developer Advocate" that would indicate we're talking about
outside devs.

------
mwerty
Reminds me of [http://www.fakesteve.net/2009/11/hell-hath-no-fury-like-a-
bo...](http://www.fakesteve.net/2009/11/hell-hath-no-fury-like-a-borgocrat-
scorned.html)

------
sheraz
The no-so-subtle cosmosDB pitch missed the real killer feature: mongodb
compatibility And hipaa compliant.

[https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/cosmos-db/mongodb-
int...](https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/cosmos-db/mongodb-introduction)

I'm not shilling just a happy azure user.

------
bmsleight_
TIL - Microsoft now uses git for the Windows code base. The blogs.msdn artcles
linked by hackernoon was terrible, but hackernoon one line summary was good.

Maybe there have changed ?

Being able not to use windows at Microsoft is a surprise.

------
AJRF
> ashleymcnamara Proud thinker. Avid creator. Devoted explorer. Incurable
> student. Humble Gopher. Principal Developer Advocate @Microsoft. Creator of
> gopherize.me

"Principal Developer Advocate"

I see

------
type0
MS has gone full circle now and they are on "Embrace" stage now. Just wait for
"Extend" and then it will be on "Extinguish" all over again.

------
jaclaz
>The impact I’ll have at a company like Microsoft will be huge and at the end
of the day, that’s what it’s about, right?

Hmmm. Modest, not all over, but in spots.

------
bsaul
ms still has a long way to go imho.

i recently thought about developping my backend on fsharp with dotnet core, on
a mac. Well, let me just say that the commitment of ms to some of their open
source projects leave to be desired. documentation is painfully hard to find (
compare to apple or even java main web frameworks, where everything is neatly
organized in one place), community is inexistant, the main "getting started"
videos on youtube is obsolete ( project file format changed in the
meantine)... And the only fsharp plugin for vscode is developped by a third
company and requires _mono_ to be installed, for some reason.

Maybe it's just that nobody uses fsharp though. So then i tried to find some
general architectural overview of asp.net core, and i didn't even know where
to start looking. Ms documentation site is a maze, and you can only find short
articles on very detailled subject, but nothing really top down.

Now the reason for all that is of course that the MS users ecosystem is made
of consulting companies selling "experts", and training companies selling
training. Nobody there has any interest in good, free, online resources.

~~~
oblio
They truly have a long way to go, especially concerning awareness.

But I feel that things will pick up once they release dotnet core 2.0, which
will support dotnet standard 2.0, basically the equivalent to the Java base
libraries. Up to now things were still in flux and nobody serious wanted to
touch the stuff. Now they've mostly settled down.

------
francesca
Looks like this article was sponsored by MSFT.

