
"Microsoft needs Wizards" (orig 1984 usenet posting) - sbraford
http://groups.google.com/group/net.jobs/msg/4f2cf440919eeda9
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brett
I wasn't really aware of what was going on at Microsoft in 1984, but if what
is claimed in that is true then if helps contextualizes for me what is
currently going on at Google because they've been making similar claims in
recent years. If the beast that I know as Microsoft used to be a forward
thinking awesome place to work then there's a lot of reason to people Google
will eventually morph into a similar beast. Get enough people together and
bureaucracy and mediocrity will carry the day. You can get creative and take
longer to get to that point, but ultimately unless you halt employee growth or
create something so loosely federated that it cannot really be thought of as a
single company you're driving toward Microsoft.

~~~
vlad
It works like this. Every startup company has programmers who actually create
things and shape the world. Replacing any of such people is a bit hit.
Switching from one person's vision to another is difficult if there were only
two or three people in the company to begin with.

Once you have thousands of employees, each one is now given a role that is
replaceable. Do this specific task, every day. If you quit, we find somebody
else. The job becomes boring, just so the company can easily replace you.

In other words, startups just care about the product. But big companies have
the same mentality towards their own employees. They no longer limit a system
to product development, but systemize employees as well. Employees are no
longer there to innovate, but to be a cog.

That's why the same companies that start out being created by visionaries,
suck to work at when they are huge, because now they are looking for cogs.
Hiring is just part of a system to replace some previous cogs.

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vlad
\- informal lounges for design/discussion/rap sessions

Maybe if they spent the time writing software instead of practicing rap music.
Talk about wrong time, wrong place.

~~~
lupin_sansei
Funny! Didn't "rap" mean something like "free form brainstorming" in the 70s?
I noticed it in the Simpsons:

\----

Flanders: Reverend, I'm, uh, I'm afraid something terrible has happened.

Lovejoy: Well, sit down and rap with me brother, that's what I'm here for.

Flanders: [sits] I was talked into doing a dance called "The Bump," but my hip
slipped and my ... my buttocks came into contact with the ... buttocks of
another young man.

~~~
pg
It was just hip/black slang for "talk."

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pg
Interesting we're reading this on Google. It never occurred to MSFT that a
usenet archive would be good to have.

~~~
aston
Well, it's not like Google was keeping it, either. Deja should get most of the
props here, I think.

~~~
pg
I heard that in addition to the archives they bought from Deja News, there was
also a guy within Google who did a lot of work to reconstruct posts from old
tapes accumulated by individual people.

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barrkel
Wow. It reads like a checklist of all the things that have gone wrong in MS -
albeit things that go wrong in most (all?) large corps.

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ced
Sounds like the Google Blog, only more awkward.

MS had "no venture capital owners or cash crunches to limit us" in 1984?

~~~
byrneseyeview
Microsoft almost ran out of money back in their Micro-Soft days as language
designers for iffy computer kit companies. Gates has been conservative about
cash ever since, which is why they avoided paying a dividend for about a
decade after they went blue chip.

