

Corporate stereotypes, and why Microsoft could kill your startup career - kaelswanson
http://mattswanson.org/corporate-stereotypes-and-why-microsoft-could-kill-your-startup-career/

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pgroves
Full text from google cache:

Corporate stereotypes, and why Microsoft could kill your startup career

Note: This post is intended for engineers who are looking to start their own
company or join an early stage startup. Many of the critiques I suggest do not
apply to engineers who enjoy the comfort of a larger company. As the CTO of a
growing early stage startup, I have had the experience of interviewing a
number of very talented people. As with any large enough dataset, I have come
to find some consistent patterns amongst the candidates. While there are and
will always be a set of clearly untalented unqualified people, I am surprised
by the number of genuinely talented people who––because of choices they’ve
made in their career––are now unqualified to work at an actual web startup or
start their own.

The provocative title to this post may sound like I’m suggesting that the
problem is local to Microsoft. In reality, Microsoft just epitomizes the large
bureaucratic environment that seems to confine an engineer to become just
that, an engineer. This typically leads to detailed knowledge in some
proprietary technology which is not compatible outside of the company it
applies to. Moreover, larger companies tend to position engineers to remain
engineers. If you want to someday start your own company, you will need to
have a network of investors and people with diverse and complimentary
skillsets to your own. And after three years at Googlesoft, the only people
you know will be engineers.

This goes against a prevailing mindset amongst freshly minted, high talent
engineers, which seems to be that if you aren’t ready to start a company, the
next best thing to do is to go to a “startup” like Facebook or Google and get
connected into the valley. This would make sense if either Facebook or Google
was actually a startup. Neither one is, and this path can end up leading
engineers down a decidedly non-entrepreneurial path.

The more likely outcome if you do go down this path, is that every day you
become less likely to start your own company. Every day you are probably
learning some proprietary technology that isn’t helping your startup career.
Every day you are becoming more and more accustomed to that cushy job and fat
salary.

I’ve seen this happen to too many friends that I once would have considered
“die-hard” entrepreneurs. I hate to see entrepreneurs give up, it’s a truly
sad thing to witness.

Below are some stereotypes that I have gathered from the larger subsets of
candidates I’ve interacted with. I use the word stereotype purposely to
indicate that these are unfair assumptions when considering individuals at
each company, but seem to embody the culture at said company. This assessment
is intended to give startup-minded engineers an idea of how experience at some
of the bigger tech companies looks to a startup founder hiring early
employees.

Facebook: Some of the more intelligent people I have talked with, but
borderline autistic. To date, I wouldn’t want any one of the people I’ve
talked with at Facebook working on my team. My impression is that this type of
person would create beautiful software, but jet at the first hint of trouble.
There seems to be very few risk takers.

Beyond that, for a young startup there are characteristics other than
technical prowess that are vital to growing a company. Outside of Facebook,
Aspberger’s Syndrome is not thought of as an “asset”. A small team can’t have
the liability of someone on the team alienating other team members because
they aren’t aware of human emotion. If even one of my team members is
constantly getting pissed off at another member, dev team productivity can go
down by 50%. Can’t happen.

If you are at Facebook and looking to someday do your own startup, make sure
you are interacting with non-tech people. Get out of the office…but don’t just
go and play Rock Band with the same two friends you’re used to. Make sure you
are interacting with non-tech people, they actually do have value in the
startup world.

Of course if the only thing you care about is working on interesting
technology, Facebook sounds like a great place.

Google: The new IBM. No longer a startup culture. Despite what they like to
tell themselves, the company has morphed over the past three years. Once
again, Google is huge and of course there are some startup-minded people
there, but that’s not the prevailing culture.

What I have seen are a lot of talented engineers who end up working on
“interesting projects” that have no place in the market. I find it
entertaining reading quotes from Google, such as:

“Google is still the same entrepreneurial company it was when I [Larry Page]
started, encouraging Googlers to take on big ideas and high-risk, high-reward
opportunities”.

Take a moment to think of what the real “risk” is at Google. What happens if
you fail? Your project is just a drop in the bucket from the endless Google
money pit. Most likely, you will not be scarred.

Whereas entrepreneurs systematically try to create something that people want
(and will pay for), Google systematically creates things that hardcore
engineers think are cool. When a company openly dismisses the value of
designers and business analysts, you end up with Google Wave.

Bottom Line: The Google Search cash cow has created an inward, engineer-
focused culture that is been systematically shielded from market forces and,
consequently, market discipline.

If you are an entrepreneurial minded engineer at Google, don’t get stuck
hanging around Googlers your entire time. Google has done a great job of
creating a comfortable work environment that encourages long hours at their
playground. You need to get to startup events and go out drinking with actual
entrepreneurs and investors. I guarantee that you will hear completely
different responses from a startup founder on how they would approach a real
world problem as compared with your coworker. The technology behind the
solution will only be part of the answer.

Beyond that, try launching something. Can you create something that people
actually want to use? Not something that is nice to look at once and strike a
fleeting interest, but something that will actually result in people wanting
and using your creation. If you can, you are ready for a startup. If not find
someone with complementary skillsets or a startup that can help you learn
this.

Microsoft: Microsoft has kept a pretty tight screening process for engineers,
but if you are an engineer there, make sure you are working outside of
Microsoft. Microsoft is very tied to the .net platform. I don’t know how many
startups use .net as their development environment but there aren’t a lot. In
fact, if your primary development platform is Windows your are going to get
bumped down a couple notches if you are looking to join a startup. I have been
pretty impressed with raw aptitude from Microsoft employees, but if you aren’t
exposed to non-proprietary technologies, its going to be very difficult to
sell yourself to an early stage startup.

More Companies: There are many more companies not mentioned due to either lack
of enough candidates to make an assessment or to keep from pissing off some of
our investors.

In general, if you want to start a company some day, my best advice is to
either start one NOW, or join an early stage company. If you decide to join a
startup, make sure you join one where you can have direct interaction with the
founders. If not, you aren’t getting the real benefits that a startup can
offer.

Note: if you are a talented entrepreneurial minded engineer at any of the
above companies (or just in general) drop me a line. I will either try to hire
you, or give you a sense of where you fit in with what I’ve seen.

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pgroves
If the author wants the traffic to go through his site (once he gets a mirror
up), just leave a comment and I'll delete the above copy.

~~~
MediaSquirrel
Whew. It's working again!

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MediaSquirrel
Ok, it was working. Getting crushed even further. Maybe it will work again in
a few?

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sriramk
This is pretty interesting since I know of a Microsoft person who was talking
to some startups in the Bay Area to find a potential role (this person is one
of the most talented engineer/product manager I've met, has run some very
critical initiatives for MSFT and extremely well-versed in both the Microsoft
and the non-Microsoft landscape and is looking to move to the Bay Area from
Seattle for personal reasons).

There were atleast two really terrible experiences with very well-known
startups (think 'often on HN's front page'). In one case, the interviewer
asked "So, you work in Microsoft - have you heard of this thing called an
iPhone?" . And in another interview, the person at the other end couldn't hide
his disdain for Microsoft and Microsoft-people in general throughout the
interview.

I think there's an opportunity here for startups to hire some great engineers
when they look past stereotypes (which is really what the OP's post is
reflecting). Going into a hiring discussion with a preconceived notion is
always a bad idea (and this post is full of stereotypes with the FB one
probably being the most negative).

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MediaSquirrel
And yet...stereotypes often come from somewhere, no? Would you say that these
stereotypes are inaccurate in terms of the general picture they paint?

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enjo
I would most definitely say that. I've hired from corporate cultures far more
rigorous than Microsofts (Samsung springs to mind) with great results. A smart
engineer who can get things done is a strong engineer regardless of where
they've cut their teeth.

One only needs to look at all of the startups that IBM, famous for their
bureaucratic structure, too see what rubbish this is.

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tomorrow_today
Divisions and collaborative ventures that start in a large companies' research
lab and eventually split off or are sold to another party are not startups.

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droz
What absolute drivel. Any engineer worth their wage doesn't pigeon hole
themselves into one technology. Those that do, you simply don't hire and they
fade into obsolescence.

Concepts are more important that technologies. If you embrace the Microsoft
stack, that gives you but one view of how things can be pieced together. If
you embrace some different stack that gives you another view and so on.

To claim that you are somehow inferior as a developer for using a Microsoft
stack is just bigoted and really doesn't have any place on hacker news.

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bryanlarsen
Did you read the same article I did? The article said very little about which
stack you used, and spent as much time, if not more time, attacking Facebook
and Google employees than Microsoft employees. He basically said two things:

1) if you're a facebook or google employee, get out more and interact with
people who aren't also employees there.

2) if you're a microsoft employee, make sure you work on stuff that uses a
non-microsoft stack.

In other words, he agrees with you on the Microsoft side and you're just
aimlessly ranting about an article you didn't read.

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larsberg
There's another thing you should take away from this article: if all you want
to do is work on really hard technical problems, be well compensated, and
never have to worry about managing people and career-limited for it,
Microsoft, Facebook, and Google are all great places to do that. Having sat on
the other side of the hiring wall from the author -- as a manager doing hiring
of developers at Microsoft -- I found that college students who had gone off
to a startup for several years often had gained some breadth (product
knowledge, used/configured more types of systems, etc.) but had failed to gain
much real technical depth.

I take a little bit of issue with his characterization of risk at these big
companies. I don't know anyone working at any of those companies who hasn't
experienced feature or product cancellation at some point in their career.
Well, except for a couple of guys who've worked on debuggers and text editors
for their entire 15+-year careers, but those are special cases :-)

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credo
The title is catchy, but it doesn't seem to do justice to the contents of the
post.

If anything, it seemed like the post was somewhat complimentary of Microsoft
and a lot more critical of Facebook and Google. OTH the title seemed to be
harsh on Microsoft and doesn't mention Facebook or Google.

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ig1
I was at DDD9 on Saturday (Community MS conference) and there were a lot of
startup folks there. I think it's too easy to get caught up with a subset of
the community (say the mobile startup community or the rails community) and
lose sight of the bigger picture.

Certainly among b2b startups BizSpark has encouraged a lot of startups to go
with the MS stack where they previously would have gone with Rails, etc. While
consumer startups seem in general to be more often based on non-MS stack
there's plenty of MS stack consumer startups (PlentyOfFish, Just-Eat,
StackOverflow) which have become the dominant players in their field.

When it comes down to it, for most startups it doesn't really matter what your
stack is, just pick the stack that you're most productive with.

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acconrad
TL;DR: don't be complacent.

Slightly less TLDR: companies which foster working there all the time
(Facebook, Google) are the kind of people who need to go out and meet people
besides their coworkers. Companies which foster working on their own stack the
whole time (Microsoft) are the kind of people who need to go out and use other
programming languages.

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Dylanlacey
This is a wonderful post! Mainly because I saw this happening to me before I
took steps to stop it.

It is _very_ possible to become trapped in a skillset, even one that seems
highly desirable. I've got friends who are thrilled at getting jobs in certain
technical spaces and I hope for their sake that they get to do a bit of
everything.

One of the best things I did at my last job was become a Scrum Master, mainly
because it stretched some muscles I hadn't used for a while, and discovered I
actually really like using.

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tomorrow_today
A stable system must have high diversity and high connectivity. If you do not
have a network with strong connections to many people of many backgrounds, you
will have trouble surviving/understanding changes in the world around you and
you will eventually become irrelevant. The startup environment is incredibly
taxing on a person and the group. If the people in a startup are not well
connected and diverse in knowledge, they will not be resilient enough to
survive internal or external conflict. In small groups, it only takes one
person with a small network or a limited scope to make it all crumble when the
pressure is on.

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kkshin
I try really hard to not get pigeon-holed into using my company's (one of the
mentioned ones) stack but its really hard. Why? Cause when you have a full-
time job then you're working 8-9 hours a day and there's really not that much
time left over. I do a lot of side projects that usually revolve around non-
proprietary technology but really there are only so many hours a day. I think
it comes down to a decision of whether you want to sacrifice employment
productivity over your own enrichment (which might never even pay off)

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kaelswanson
Agreed, and I think this decision is what defines an entrepreneur

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rwhitman
So people can't adapt? Once you've worked in one place, you're stuck that way
forever?

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MediaSquirrel
Read the article. It's not that people can't adapt, it's that they need to
make themselves adaptable. Startups need people who can be productive on day
one. Someone who has only worked with proprietary technology cannot meet that
requirement.

Ergot, if you're working at a place that relies on proprietary technologies,
you need to take proactive steps to not tie yourself exclusively to them.

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viggity
anyone have a mirror?

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kaelswanson
ugh...having server issues, cached copy:
[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://mattswanson.org/corporate-
stereotypes-and-why-microsoft-could-kill-your-startup-career/&hl=en&strip=0)

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kprobst
Unfortunately that doesn't work from behind most corp proxies. They see the
Google cache (and even Google Translate) as an evil way to get around their
restrictions.

