

Aging Microsoft lures young tech idealists - TDL
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/06/12/us-microsoft-hiring-interns-idUSBRE85B0L520120612

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SlipperySlope
"... Of course, back then the sense of mission was boosted by the fact that
Microsoft stock increased 90-fold in the 1990s, creating a host of stock
option millionaires. Those days are long over, and Microsoft shares are still
well below their 1999 peak.

The idea that the company can embody a start-up spirit at this stage of its
development might also be a stretch. A recent book published anonymously by
two former Microsoft employees, called ‘Stack Rank This!', portrays a company
beset by abusive managers and dysfunctional teams where the appraisal process
- the notorious stack rank system - actually works against the company's
progress."

~~~
sliverstorm
Smaller, self-contained teams like Bing and Xbox are/were allegedly insular
enough to foster such a spirit.

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Aaronontheweb
I'm 26 - have worked at Microsoft since I was 24.

Microsoft recruited me off of Hacker News after my first startup failed and
it's been a great place for me to learn and develop.

One great thing about Microsoft: I've been able to advance and take on bigger
/ more interesting projects without my young age being held against me. I
can't stress how much I appreciate that after having been in environments
where that wasn't the case.

~~~
maslam
+1. I left for Microsoft from a failed startup, and found a home in Azure.
Microsoft is a huge company, with lots of great products to work on. I have
met some of the smartest people her.e Generalizing Microsoft is like
generalizing a country like the United States - are you talking about rural
Michigan or Brooklyn? There is definitely monoculture (meetings! lots of
email!), but it's not as pervasive as some might think. Aaron we should meet
up (baslam)!

~~~
Aaronontheweb
Sounds good - I'll hit you up on the GAL, although I'm based out of LA :p

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rlu
This is my second internship at Microsoft. I worked on Office last year and
now I'm working on Windows Live (though it gets kind of hairy since WL is
getting killed off and really my team interfaces directly with Win8 so I think
of it as just building Windows services).

This is why I like Microsoft:

* You get to impact the lives of millions and millions of people. I find this really cool. I can't wait for Office 15 to come out and be able to see people in my class or on the bus or whatever using features I made. You feel a big (and mixed) sense of responsibility and pride. What we are doing really does matter. If you fuck up, millions of people are going to be affected. If you do an amazing job, the same thing happens but in a positive way. Just think about that for a second.

* Microsoft is virtually involved in every market. Want to make an OS? Go work on Windows. Now you're working on a product with ~85% marketshare. That's pretty cool right? Want a change? Want to see what it's like to work on a product that is the underdog? Go have some fun in Windows Phone. After that, if you want to give search engines a try go ahead and work at Bing. If that doesn't work out, you literally have so many other options (Xbox, Azure, Surface, Visual Studio, Office, IE, etc.)

* You can really feel that you're in an atmosphere of extremely bright and intelligent people (for the most part). This keeps you extremely motivated in case for whatever reason the above things aren't enough.

* While this may seem silly and very minor compared to the above points, it's pretty fracking (sorry been watching BSG) cool to use software before it gets revealed or released to the masses. Knowing secrets is fun :)

~~~
wickedchicken
> This is my second internship at Microsoft. I worked on Office last year and
> now I'm working on Windows Live

real talk: have you ever worked on an 'embrace, extend, extinguish'[1] feature
or are rank-and-file engineers shielded from that? the only microsofties I
know worked at MSR and from what I understand that is a much different
environment than actual microsoft. kind of curious what it's actually like in
there[2].

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend_and_extinguish>

[2] I tend toward the side of linux zealot so I'm trying to soften my tone
here

~~~
zheng
I can't speak for the grandparent, but I've encountered zero of the famous
mindset here. There is a definite competitive nature, but customer needs, not
business rivals, are what are pushed to even the lowest devs. I'm working on
something that is pretty much an internal tool, but the level of emphasis of
being able to use it for modeling the needs of real customers is quite high.

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brown9-2
_"What kind of business model is that, shoving ads in peoples' faces?" said
one Microsoft intern, who asked not to be named._

Doesn't Microsoft wish it had a big advertising business also?

~~~
huggyface
The whole thing sounds like a ridiculous PR piece. Microsoft is changing the
world, I tell you, by trying to get a piece of the pie of someone changing the
world.

~~~
MikeCapone
That's exactly my feeling as well. Looks like MSFT's PR people shadow-wrote
this piece.

~~~
focusfocusfocus
You've made a strong allegation. Can you explain it, considering this
statement at the end of the article?

> (Reporting by Bill Rigby in Seattle; Editing by Jonathan Weber and Richard
> Chang)

~~~
ryanhuff
The writer is based in Seattle, and predominately writes on topics related to
Washington state, including a healthy dose of Microsoft-related stories (not
always rosy).

<http://blogs.reuters.com/bill-rigby>

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bcbrown
The article just boils down to "people interning at Microsoft have a positive
impression of their employer." That's hardly a surprise, especially if they're
interviewing people now, when they've barely begun their internship.

~~~
inoop
MSRA intern here. I'm a 31 PhD student with six years of work experience in
two startups and a middle-sized software company. Microsoft (Research) is a
great place to work simply because there's lots of really, really smart people
here.

And for the record, I mainly use Linux on my desktop and nobody cares :)

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AdamTReineke
Microsoft intern here in week three of my 12 week internship. I'll say this:
the longer I'm here, the more excited I am about being a part of Microsoft.

~~~
revolutions
Any tips on applying as an intern? Are the online applications a decent route?
Sorry; not entire on topic, but I've wanted to intern there for years.

~~~
zheng
I can't say what the best way to apply is, but if you send me your email (see
profile) and optionally a link or description of what you've done/what you are
interested in, I'd be happy to pass it on to a recruiter.

~~~
revolutions
Ah, cool. Thanks! I'll keep that in mind, and send you an email sometime. I'd
like to work on some small projects, take a few more classes, learn some new
things for a while before applying again. No point applying repeatedly without
having added anything, heh. Thanks for the reference, though; I'll be sure to
annoy you sometime this year with an email.

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mschalle
They have a program called Explorers [1] that's been driving a lot of their
internship success. It lets interns rotate through different departments,
rather than focus on one area.

[1] [http://careers.microsoft.com/careers/en/us/internships-
explo...](http://careers.microsoft.com/careers/en/us/internships-explore-
microsoft.aspx)

~~~
AdamTReineke
Not just different departments, different professions: 4 weeks in development,
4 weeks in test, 4 weeks in project management.

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NadaAldahleh
"Giant Start-up" is an oxymoron.

Giant companies shouldn't pretend to be start-ups or have start-ups cultures.

~~~
nostromo
Why not?

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phene
Because you lose the intimacy of start-up culture at scale.

~~~
rlu
I beg to differ. This is the thing that people misunderstand about Microsoft.

When you work at Microsoft you don't just "work at Microsoft". You work for a
TEAM in Microsoft. For example, last year I was an intern on Word. The Word
client team consists of maybe ~30 people. You don't feel like you're working
with 40k people, but instead a small group of around 30. And you could see how
it can become even more granular when you take dev/test/pm disciplines into
account.

We have lunch together, we go out after work together, we play board games
after work, we do all sorts of fun things together.

It may be fair to say that a giant company should not have a start up culture,
though I would find it ludicrous to say that ~teams~ within big companies
should not have a start up culture.

* Caveat: Because Microsoft is so big, you'll find that cultures can vary between teams. For example, Bing is rumored to have one of the worst cultures in the company. A culture of excessive work, excessive competition, and overall unpleasant times and people.

~~~
philwelch
Sure, but don't you have to deal with politics and policies from the rest of
the company, or occasionally interface with bureaucrats from other
departments, other buildings even? Working in a team of 30 people at a big
company is never anything like working in a company of 30 people.

~~~
rlu
Oh, I agree. I don't think working here is like working at a startup (in some
good ways and some bad ways). I just thought that it was unfair to say that
only startups are allowed to have "intimacy".

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srj
I too had a great time during my internship at Microsoft. I'll never forget
the sense of adventure I felt moving across the country to work in a team that
made news headlines and impacted millions of people.

Working there full-time I found to be much different. The review system is a
competition between peers, and it creates an environment that is at times
hostile and at times theatrical. Instead of focusing on technical/product
successes people were concerned with "visibility" from their higher ups.
Because of this competition for good visibility, office politics dominated the
promotion process. People would take credit for other's work and position
themselves to dodge accountability for mistakes.

In consequence, many (but not all) of the people who were promoted into
management were people I didn't want to work for. The worst manager I had
there avoided talking about anything technical and was strictly interested in
deadlines and, of course, his own visibility. To indicate his disinterest to
his direct reports whenever someone began to discuss an issue in technical
detail he would fake a loud and obnoxious yawn. Other managers I interacted
with were better, but people like that who would "manage up" seemed to keep
getting promoted.

Disclaimer: I work at Google now.

~~~
rlu
Out of curiosity, what team did you work for and in what years? Did you return
full time to the same team you interned in?

~~~
srj
I started in 2007 as an intern on a project for Outlook. When I came back I
joined a Forefront-related team where I stayed until the beginning of last
year.

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redwood
PR fluff piece. Sure it's great to have money and a nice life style in a
beautiful city. MSFT offers this to its employees.

But come on, MSFT is on a long-term downward trajectory. There's nothing
that's going to change that until they completely replace their management. As
long as their management continue living off incredible past revenues they'll
have no incentive to change.

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atpaino
Intern at Microsoft here.

As time goes on, Google and Facebook will eventually be bogged down by the
same bureaucracy that exists in any large company. The main difference between
Google/Facebook and Microsoft at that point will be what business they are in.
If the past and present are any indicator of the future (which I accept might
not be the case), then Google and Facebook will be bringing in the vast
majority of their revenue through selling ads. Microsoft, on the other hand,
will probably still be making their big money selling software. Now I'm sure
that a lot will argue that Microsoft makes $x off of android and $y off of
linux, but this doesn't really make much of a difference to the engineers. In
my opinion, what does make a difference, especially in the minds of "young
tech idealists", is that Microsoft sells software, not ads (for the most
part).

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ajju
Microsoft is a great company if you want to spend 5-10 years and build a
career at a large corporation. You'll most likely have a very narrowly defined
role, but will be paid slightly better in cash. If you want to have bigger
impact, and can afford to take lower pay, start a startup or join one.*

A lot of interns Microsoft hires are international students, who, limited by
visa rules, cannot afford to take bigger risks.

* Shameless plug: If you are looking for something more exciting than Microsoft, we are hiring. We have built a startup that makes real life logistics more efficient, already helps thousands of people in a concrete way everyday, makes non-trivial revenue, and has raised money from great investors. We also pay better than most startups. Email me: aarjav@gatech.edu

~~~
revolutions
Just curious, have you worked at Microsoft before? (Serious question; I'm not
trying to discount your opinion either way)

~~~
ajju
No, but a lot of my friends went to work for them straight out of school. A
couple still do, and they are happy.

I also just hired someone who worked there for 2 years. So I have some
perspective from both sides, but not as an insider.

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keyle
Have you read the amount of comments about Microsoft and loving to be an
intern here?

I'm sorry but I have to ask, is this some sort of smart advertising campaign?

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Metrop0218
As a returning Microsoft intern I will definitely endorse this article. I love
this place, I was in Windows last summer and I'm in Windows Phone this summer
and it's a very exciting time to be here.

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mkramlich
There needs to be a word or term for the phenomenon where someone says, "X is
Y!!!" when it's pretty clear that overall and in the general case there are a
much larger number of non-X things that are much more Y.

"The US Federal government bureaucracy is an agile, fast-moving cheetah!"

Yes, except all those businesses which are even more agile and faster-moving
super-cheetahs. But okay.

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cpunks
If you want to do good, rather than sell ads, why not apply some place like
edX (jobs@mitx.mit.edu) or Khan Academy
([http://hire.jobvite.com/CompanyJobs/Careers.aspx?k=JobListin...](http://hire.jobvite.com/CompanyJobs/Careers.aspx?k=JobListing&c=qd69Vfw7))?
Both are actively hiring, and let you do a lot of good for the world. Like a
serious lot of good.

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phene
I don't think I would ever work at Microsoft, but I feel especially that way
because of leadership like Steve Balmer.

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moron
Good for them, glad they're happy. I've read and heard too much to ever go
there myself, I think. All I can say is, holler at those people in five years
and see how they feel then.

