
In 8 months at Microsoft, I learned these things - philk10
http://ahmetalpbalkan.com/blog/8-months-microsoft/
======
rmah
I'm not sure where to start. This is a person at his first job out of college
and he's been there for less than a year (two if we're being generous). And
yet he has the audacity to say "I learned that one will see this sort of
problems in all large scale companies."? Really? This is absurd. I can't wrap
my head around the sort of arrogance and myopia that makes a 21 or 22 yr old
think that he can describe an entire world from such limited experience.

I've been working for over 20+ years now. During that time, I've worked at
half a dozen large corps, a few medium sized ones, and a few startups. I've
seen both great teams with great practices and bad teams with poor practices.
One thing that I can say though: the size of the company didn't seem to have
much to do with it. Even with my experience, I don't think I've seen much more
than a thin slice of the variance in practices that is out there.

Note, I'm not saying that this guy didn't experience what he wrote about at
Microsoft. But at a corporation that size, you'll likely find that different
groups have different practices. This was certainly true at the large
companies I've been at. Some teams were super-sharp, others were sloppy beyond
words. Even if all teams at MS suck (which I doubt, but I will admit it's
possible), this says nothing about how other companies operate and very little
about how large corporations operate.

Word of advice: don't mistake the worlds you extrapolate inside your head for
reality.

~~~
alpb
Hey there, author of the post here. I thought I may justify what I said.

I have friends in almost all big companies and I discuss them about these
issues a lot. Almost all of them agree that they are in a similar situation.

I know that even Microsoft is a huge world and NOT all organizations are the
same. All organizations have their own culture so there's no common culture in
the company I can describe. In a way this is good.

So the statement "Even if all teams at MS suck" would be really wrong. In
addition to this, organizations get better and develop culture over time.
Thanks for the comment.

~~~
bkurtz13
I am at the same point in my career as you. My first job out of college was at
HP. I must say that everything you mentioned was the case for me too.

Now I'm at a smaller company, and my quality of life has improved
tremendously.

~~~
mlwarren
Ex IBMer here. Spent some time there when I was OPs age and my experience was
similar. I'm at a mid-size company and it's better but still not perfect!
Nothing is, at least all the time, I assume.

------
papercruncher
I spent 5 years at Microsoft as a dev and share almost none of the author's
sentiments. I had very few meetings, my manager went out of his way to make
sure that I was not blocked, code reviews were mandatory, blogging on
technical aspects was ok, had ample free time to work on any side project I
wanted (even encouraged to work with MSR on things that were more researchy),
etc etc... I could go on for a while.

Sure, there was a huge emphasis on shipping rather than spending days space
architecting the codebase and sure, not every piece of code was a stellar
example that would show up in a college textbook but I'm having the exact same
problems while doing my own startup, where at times I knowingly incur some
technical debt in order to ship on time.

~~~
spiderPig
Also, worthwhile to note that this guy is an SDET and not an SDE at Microsoft.

VAST difference in quality between the two disciplines.

~~~
alpb
Hey there, author of the post here. Yes I believe there are different
realities in Dev and Test organizations and this may be the pure source of my
experience (in both positive and negative aspects). Thanks for pointing that
out.

~~~
spiderPig
You should add that to your blog :)

------
jedanbik
I wish I could say things were better on the academic end of scientific
computing.

Expect no documentation in corporations. --> Expect no documentation in
research code.

It is not what you do, it is what you sell. --> It is not what you do, it is
what you publish.

Not everybody is passionate for engineering. --> It is not what you do, it is
what you publish.

2-3 hours of coding a day is great. --> It is not what you do, it is what you
publish.

Not giving back to the public domain is a norm. --> Not giving back to the
public domain is a norm because you might not own your data, or because you
might not have any documentation.

The world outside is not known here a lot. --> Ivory towers?

It is all about getting shit done. --> It is all about getting shit published.

Copy-pasting code can be okay. --> Copy-pasting code is okay.

Code reviews can be skipped. --> Code reviews? You're lucky if we keep track
of revisions.

Your specialties usually do not matter. --> You are your specialty.

At the end, you are working for your manager’s and their managers’ paychecks.
--> At the end, you are working for your advisor and your advisors’ grants.

~~~
sidww2
To be fair, the job of the academia is to do research. Coding is just a means
to an end. If on the other hand, you're distributing your code or it's
intended as an ongoing project, then good comments and architecture are
important (Disclaimer: I'm a PhD student).

~~~
gohrt
The job of the engineer is to ship products, not code. (Unless you sell code
or maybe library-components)

See, it's easy to ship responsibility on either side, with the exact same line
of reasoning.

~~~
sidww2
Usually though that product code will be worked on by many other people. The
same is often not true of academic projects.

~~~
nostrademons
There's still an opportunity cost to writing documentation. How many other
people will work on that code? 2-3? 12? 100? 2000? If it's 2-3 or even a
dozen, you're better off explaining in person how it works, while if it's 2000
there better be some persistent written documentation.

It probably also doesn't help that the number of people who look at a given
piece of code follows a power law, which means that when _you 're_ doing the
looking, you are probably looking at a piece of code that many other people
have looked at. Everybody remembers the terrible mess that they had to puzzle
out without any documentation. Most of the time they don't remember all the
little experiments they did that never saw the light of day, where time spent
documenting would just be wasted.

~~~
sidww2
If the product you're working on is a long term project of the company, it's
likely you'll leave before it's over in which case there will be a future
person who'll have to figure out your code. In such a case, documentation is
essential as otherwise this person would have to contact you after you've
moved onto other projects and may have forgotten the intimate details of the
code making things tricky.

~~~
nostrademons
That's why you have at least two people work on every part of the code,
ideally together, but you could easily arrange a hand-off. Solo-developer
projects are bad ideas for other reasons, notably that if you get hit by a
truck the company is SOL.

------
matwood
_Expect no documentation in corporations._

True anywhere. Lots of OSS is horribly documented. Documentation is not only
hard, but adds debt that now must be maintained. No documentation is better
than wrong documentation.

 _It is not what you do, it is what you sell._

Welcome to business (and life really). While selling styling changes is going
to be hard, selling bug fixing, code changes to be more robust and easier to
manage are easy sells. If changes will make it easier (aka cheaper) to add new
features even the least technical business person will get it.

 _Not everybody is passionate for engineering._

Not everyone has the same engineering passion. I don't care that my new router
with IPV6 gives me some large number of IPs, but I do get excited when I can
integrate a new framework which makes my job easier.

 _It is all about getting shit done_

This is life. Do you really think the small companies of the world don't care
about getting shit done? The small companies of the world are often more
concerned because they don't have MS Office level cash cows keeping them
afloat.

 _Latest software, meh._

Because it often breaks shit and gets in the way of getting shit done.

* I spend most of my time trying to figure out how others’ uncommented/undoumented code work, debugging strange things*

Programming is mostly reading code. I don't feel like looking it up right now,
but Clean Code references the study. Reading code _is_ coding.

~~~
AlisdairO
> Programming is mostly reading code. I don't feel like looking it up right
> now, but Clean Code references the study. Reading code is coding.

Well said - certainly the most valuable skill I've picked up post education
and working for $BIGCORP is the ability to quickly read and understand other
people's code.

------
Danieru
I am doing an internship in Windows and I have to say his first few points are
right on the dot.

The windows debugger does have proper documentation. I know this because two
separate people on opposite ends of Windows Org made a point to mention this.
Yet the documentation itself is not more than one would expect from complex
software's man page. This contrasts well with the software I am integrating
with for one of my projects. The only mention I could find of said software
was a slide saying "This software has no documentation, here is a link to .NET
decompilation software".

One surprise I can add is that Windows does not have an internal package
management system. I expected to see a apt-get like tool. Instead there are
various download.com like sites hosting installers.

~~~
gisenberg
If you're interested in package management solutions on Windows, you might
want to see [http://chocolatey.org](http://chocolatey.org)

------
mathattack
"I am surprised that no one I met in Windows Azure team heard about Heroku or
Rackspace, which are direct competitors. That’s acceptable, not everybody has
to know these."

WOW! It's one thing to ignore competitors, it's another to not know who they
are. I thought (by reputation) that Microsoft was a competitive place.

"It’s hard to find a position in corporations matches what you love to do."

Seems obvious, but hindsight is 20/20.

It was a risk for them to post an article that could be considered critical of
the mothership.

~~~
shanselman
Ya, he's not paying attention. I work for Azure and everyone is very clearly
aware of the world and the competition.

~~~
rajanikanthr
scott, hope he is not creating controversy by publicizing his team n stuff..

------
groby_b
I can't comment on MS, but I can certainly tell you that not all large
companies work that way.

Some points just don't apply - I happen to be lucky enough that I do work with
passionate engineers, manage to get about 5 hours of coding done, and actually
look at reasonably decent documentation.

And some things are as they should be. Your "specialty" rarely matters that
early in your career. Most of the things mentioned (create iOS app, know
MongoDB, etc.) are things that I'd expect a good developer to pick up as
needed. Working as a software engineer is about being able to think logically,
not mastering a particular subset of skills.

And yes, latest software is frowned upon. You'll know why once you've been on
a project that went completely off the rails right before finish just because
somebody needed to upgrade the compiler. Those are things you _plan_ for. You
test the new software extensively, and see when you can best absorb the
inevitable cost of switching.

------
vowelless
He sounds like someone who is significantly lowering his standards. Seems like
working at a big corporation is killing his spirit and energy. That is just
sad.

Edit: Unless he is being sarcastic?

~~~
smackfu
His standards weren't based on the real world though.

~~~
nostrademons
The real world is an awfully broad place. There are plenty of places you can
go where mediocrity is _not_ encouraged, people do more than 2-3 hours of real
work a day, they're passionate about their work and curious about outside
developments, and your specialties do matter. If you want to work there and
find that you're not able to do that in your current job, _change your job_.

You tend to get the life you believe you deserve - if you're willing to put in
the leg work to make it happen, you can very easily reconfigure _the world
around you_ to something you're satisfied with.

------
orclev
I can't decide if this post is a joke or not. Yes a lot of what he describes
goes on in many large corporations (although rarely ALL of what he describes
unless you're one of the unfortunates stuck at one of the REALLY dysfunctional
companies), but the way this article is written makes it sound like you should
expect and be satisfied with all the things he describes. If the company you
work for suffers from about half of what he describes that's probably about
"average" for the industry, but that just means you've got a mediocre job. If
your company checks 3/4 or more of that list, your company sucks, look for
something better. If your company exhibits none, or only a couple of the
problems, that's a pretty good company, consider yourself lucky (although try
to fix the problems if you can).

Just because something is dysfunctional in the company you work for doesn't
mean you should just accept it, you should try to change it if you can, but
depending on how far down the totem pole you are you probably won't be able to
make that big a difference. In general, the better the company you work for,
the more likely you'll be able to fix what problems there are. If a company is
so dysfunctional that there's no hope for change, start looking for something
better, don't put up with a horrible working environment just because the
company is "big" or well known.

------
xradionut
I understand his experience. I've been mainly, (70% of the time), a third
party Windows developer and admin for the last two decades and have spent
thousands of hours working with and talking to Microsoft folks. Even have a
few family members that work for the corporation.

NIH: Many Remondites live in the "bubble" where technology from the outside
doesn't exist or doesn't matter. (It reminds me of the hard core Republican
base.) This extends to much of the user base as well. There is a strong denial
of OSS and there used to be taunting of Apple. (Until the iPhone kicked the
smartphone market in gear.)

Future: Redmond has some serious issues to deal with: dysfunctional
management, growing OSS usage, rejection of Win8/Xbox One and how to get
people to use Azure when it's known you are the NSA's bitch.

~~~
twoodfin
_(It reminds me of the hard core Republican base.)_

hn works better without this kind of snark. I'm sure the "hard core Democratic
base" believes most of what they read on the Daily Kos, too. Almost everyone
has a bubble around something in their lives.

------
scotty79
> I have seen the knowledge inside the company is mostly transferred by
> talking and hands-on sessions.

Yes. Exactly. IMHO this is the factor that's responsible for at least 50% of
corporate clumsiness.

> If this would have been my own company there would be tons of wiki pages.

Just having wikis won't help much. I worked at a company that had wiki, people
were putting things there as an afterthought. I was total and complete mess.
Lot's of information was outdated, duplicated, horribly messy but it still was
something. There should probable be some person with sense of structure to
prune those pages, nag people about details, construct some sort of tree from
these splinters of information.

Corporation also had task tracking system. But it wasn't helping. It was used
as afterthought to leave a trace that some work is to be done and some work
was done. What's actually to be done was passed via face to face contact.
Therefore noone cared about task tracking system and what's written there.

If you want to keep information, you have to use the system that stores it as
crucial (only?) communication chanel.

~~~
JonFish85
Wikis for documentation: great in theory, sucks in practice.

Make a change to source, then you have to figure out where the wiki page is
for it. Can't find the wiki page? Make a new one. What folder does it go in?
Do you make a new folder? What if a page does exist, but it's wrong? Do you
fix the whole thing? Just the part you added? Email the person who last
updated it?

After 6 months it ends up being a tangled mess of insanity, and no one relies
on it. You complain about outdated/indescipherable comments? Imagine that
multiplied out. In fact, it's almost worse; at least with code you can try to
think like a compiler and figure it out. Without code--yikes!

~~~
freeman478
Do you have any recommendation for documentation then ?

In my experience wikis are far from perfect and need regular gardening BUT
they are vastly better than a shared folder or a sharepoint with a ton of word
documents...

~~~
JonFish85
Depends on the project's scope, who is working on it and also users/usage I'd
say. Sometimes embedded documentation can be useful (Doxygen comes to mind).
Given a ton of time, it probably should be done in stages, and created
starting with the requirements document(s) to at least set the stage for the
thought process. There's no blanket right/wrong for all projects. For
Microsoft, my guess is that it would make sense to do the inner documentation
in much the same way as external documentation is done--people are used to it,
the system is already in place somewhere, etc.

------
Locke1689
Pretty much every single thing in here is false for my team.

The first thing he should have learned about Microsoft: every team is almost
completely separate.

~~~
jmduke
Not just Microsoft, any company that has a size greater than three digits.

On average, at a big company, you're going to spend 95% of your time
interacting with less than 1% of the employees.

~~~
nostrademons
I dunno. Numerically that seems right - Google has 30k+ employees, and I
definitely spend 95% of my time interacting with less than 1% of them.

But I've found that the breadth of interactions in that remaining 5% reaches
across a _wide_ expanse of the company. I work in Search Features. I have
friends and professional contacts not just in Features, but also in Ranking,
Maps, Glass, Google+, GFiber, Chrome, Android, AppEngine, YouTube, Research,
Brain, CourseBuilder, Doodles, legal, and PR - not to mention a whole bunch of
infrastructure teams and research projects that I can't tell you about.

And I've found that one's effectiveness in a big company is to a large extent
dependent upon the breadth of your internal professional network. The folks
who seem to shoot up and don't get pigeonholed into just writing code for
their manager are the ones who have a wide network and always seem to know
somebody who can get this thorny task done.

------
mtdewcmu
"Expect no documentation in corporations" \-- Don't expect code to be
documented anywhere, ever. It's great when it exists. Even then, don't expect
it to be accurate.

"It is not what you do, it is what you sell" \-- Capitalism -- welcome to
America.

"Not everybody is passionate for engineering" \-- You could probably find a
place to work where everyone is passionate about engineering, but I sense that
these places are uncommon and highly competitive.

"it is almost impossible to get 2 hours straight of coding for me. I spend
most of my time trying to figure out how others’ uncommented/undoumented code
work, debugging strange things..." \-- That doesn't count?

"The world outside is not known here a lot." \-- This is probably symptomatic
of the time when Microsoft was the center of the universe. It's not true
everywhere.

"Copy-pasting code can be okay. If somebody sees you doing this outside the
corporations, you’ll probably get punched in the face. I’ve seen source files
copy pasted across projects." \-- In college, you have to show that you can do
the assignment yourself. In the open source world, you have to be mindful of
copyright and licensing. Inside a company, it's all the company's code, so
there's nothing wrong with it. You don't have to prove that you can write it
yourself.

"Almost 90% of my colleagues use older versions of Office, Windows, Visual
Studio and .NET Framework." \-- It's pretty common knowledge that that's true
outside of Microsoft, but it's interesting to know that it's true inside.

"You are hired to do get something needed done. I was not expecting that. It’s
hard to find a position in corporations matches what you love to do." \--
Again, capitalism. You make things for other people, not yourself.

There's always a tension between competing priorities; the thrill of
engineering something wonderful, the reality of being part of an organization
made up of people, and the need to keep money coming in the door. A lot of
things are just facts of life, but an environment can also become toxic. At
that point you have to leave.

------
cromwellian
Obviously, these things exist a long a continuum. For example, at Google,
people do tend to write design docs, maybe because writing and sharing them
are so easy with Google Docs and Google Sites. We also write lots of "Getting
Started" docs, so a new team member can check out code and know how to get his
project up and running quickly. How to commit and test changes. How production
works. Privacy, Security, Logging, and Monitoring related docs.

Source Code documentation seems better than most companies I've worked at, and
Code Reviews are not skipped. The source control system won't allow you
(without overrides) to commit without review and approval for most projects.

We also don't like committing hacks just to get something to work. It is
generally understood that a //TODO -- will clean up later, or promise to do so
will almost never actually be cleaned up later. Rushing creates technical
debt. Not saying it doesn't happen, but the degree to which people commit
something they know to be wrong just for expediency is low.

This certainly affects agility. All of the burdens of docs, reviews, testing,
et al do slow down iteration, but I've also been slowed down by hacky code at
other companies. It's a trade off.

Personal projects are a way to let off steam and feel agile again. There you
can bypass reviews, tests, docs, and just hack hack hack.

------
utopkara
As a community, we should react responsibly and warn our members against
sharing posts like this. There is almost no useful insight, clearly parts of
it are exaggerations, and the whole thing looks like it was written for 15
minutes of HN fame.

Couple of karma points isn't worth pissing your co-workers. If you really want
karma, just make an empty post with title "If you don't vote up, I'll write a
stupid post that will ruin my career." I promise I will vote up.

------
theoutlander
There's a lot of truth to this article. Some of it might be team specific.
I've heard Azure in general is still evolving. I spent 6 years in Bing, a few
months on internal MS tools, and a year in Exchange. In Bing, I had 20
managers over 5 years whereas in Exchange, I had just one for the entire year.

Overall, Test was a joke in Bing and most of the people there weren't
passionate about coding. They were simply concerned with their bonuses and
paychecks. 360 feedback was all about bringing others down. Managers cared
about their promotions and fat checks. This problem might be common across
large companies - I've heard that from several friends across the industry.

Since I left MS, I've been happier than ever!! Now, I'm making a difference in
the world saving millions of lives and the extra time that I put in is well
worth it as it's not about competing against yet another product! :)

------
pmarca
I'm pretty sure this is Asok from Dilbert.

------
VLM
"Everybody loves finding Stack Overflow answers on search results, but nobody
contributes those answers."

Nobody OFFICIALLY does that. Probably because subsection 89 paragraph 12
clause 9 specifically prohibits that kind of activity on company time, and the
company owns everything you produce or think of outside work blah blah blah,
only company officers may speak for the company and you're not an officer, and
you are never off duty and always working for the company who owns everything
you may ever say, therefore you may never communicate with another human being
in any manner... officially... in theory...

In practice psuedonymity is the rule. No one he's met in 8 months has seen fit
to give a kid leverage over him for no apparent reason.

~~~
YZF
There are quite a few people from Microsoft answering questions on SO with
their full name. I don't think this one is a real issue. The % of people who
participate in SO is probably small in the total dev population in general.

------
yekko
I wonder if he's been to one of those back stabbing Microsoft Performance
Reviews yet, probably not since he's only there 8 months.

------
aswath87
I joined MS straight out of college as a SDET too and I agree with most of
what this. This is a broad statement, but SDET is generally not the best bet
if your goal is to be technical or entrepreneurial. My big regret is that I
stuck around for 3 years before deciding to move. My advice - change your
role/team/company soon. Realistically, nothing is going to change overnight in
your current role or team - the culture has been established over several
years. It is important to work on what you are passionate about and in a
culture that fits you, especially when you are young and when career is a big
part of your life.

------
slacka
> Expect no documentation in corporations.

I've worked with enough small to large companies, to feel confident saying
that if the culture does not value and encourage documentation, then you
shouldn't plan on staying. Back in the day we made do with SMB/NFS shares, but
with todays wikis, SharePoint, and google docs, there is no excuse.

From internal APIs docs, VPN setups, build env. setup, POs, to expense
reports, you shouldn't have to find the right person. Any company < 2 years
should be in the process of developing this stuff, and any company older
should either have it or you should be looking for a new job.

------
fragmede
> Not giving back to the public domain is a norm.

Uh, this is _Microsoft_ , they may have a slightly more close-minded view of
the open source movement than, say RedHat or Google, or hell, even Oracle.

~~~
yawgmoth
That isn't entirely true. While "giving back" may not be the norm, there are
other relevant details to consider:

[http://arstechnica.com/business/2012/04/linux-kernel-
in-2011...](http://arstechnica.com/business/2012/04/linux-kernel-
in-2011-15-million-total-lines-of-code-and-microsoft-is-a-top-contributor/)

Legal departments also get in the way of contributions to open source. "We
don't want any of our proprietary code to end up in that library" is a common
theme found among legal teams that paint with too-broad of brushes. I am
currently experiencing this.

~~~
hamburglar
Not to mention Microsoft is terrified, and I mean _terrified_ of any open
source code accidentally getting copypasted into some Windows or Office. A
team I worked on there had to indirectly use linux and there was literally one
designated person who was allowed to have a linux machine, and the machine had
to be set up by a contractor whose job it was to ensure it was scrubbed of any
source code before being handed over to the one guy who was actually allowed
to touch it. I swear, you could make the lawyers jump a mile by sneaking up
behind them and whispering "GPL"

------
addflip
Started a company... failed. Came crawling back to the corporate world,
regretfully; it hasn't been all bad but I've experienced most of your pain
points.

------
d43594
I really hope that this is a sarcastic post? If not, this article is an
absolute f __king disgrace.

First of all this is not how all large companies work. This is how bad
companies, with poor leadership, bad process, and a complete lack of
understanding work. And no, the answer isn't to be stuck so deep in process
that you cannot move! The answer, like most things, is a considered, fitting
and appropriate balance.

Secondly this attitude stinks. There is no way on Earth I would employ you to
work for me. Is it any wonder that the software industry has such a lackluster
reputation? An industry full of cowboys and CPs (copy and pasters) like
yourself. If you really think like this then you should be looking to change
your profession. Yes things need to ship, and no we can't develop forever, but
without continuous improvement where do we end up? I am sick of hearing the
'people have lives you know' excuse for utter laziness. If you feel like this
then you picked the wrong (rapidly changing) industry to work in. Too bad, so
sad. Quit whinging and get a job you can leave behind at the end of the day
e.g. shelf stacker.

------
johan_larson
It's true that engineers who work for large technical companies don't
typically pay very much attention to external tools. And there's a good reason
for that.

Companies like this already have extensive internal ecosystems of tools. These
tools were built to work together with other company systems, they adhere to
various internal development standards, have teams dedicated to supporting and
enhancing them, and are already known and trusted by other engineers and
management.

For any problem you are likely to encounter as an engineer, there is typically
an existing system that already does what you need, or close. This tool can
quite probably be improved or reconfigured to do what you need with less
effort than it would take to bring in an outside tool and make it fit internal
expectations.

Because of this, the smart bet is usually to use or extend existing solutions
rather than exploring and importing new ones. And really, just learning all
about the internal systems is a job in itself, quite enough to sate the
curiosity of nearly anyone.

------
JonFish85
The biggest thing that sticks out to me is that if you expected to spend more
than 3 hours a day writing code as opposed to simply thinking about it /
studying it / discussing it / debugging it, you may have been misguided on
what a coding job would be. I've only worked on relatively small-headcount
projects, and even when the only code in the repo was my own, most of my time
is spent debugging things, reading datasheets and discussing design choices
with others. Actual writing of new code is fairly minimal, especially after
the point in the project where you're making feature changes & additions. It
takes a lot of time to figure out what to change without breaking everything!

I have to imagine that a job that allows for 8-10 hours of pure coding (not
debugging, not discussing design, etc) every day has a boatload of half-
finished-but-not-operational projects sitting around, waiting to be tested &
completed.

------
SideburnsOfDoom
> Code reviews can be skipped, for the sake of agility

that word, "agility". I do not think that it means what you think it means.

~~~
mahmud
He forgot the "fr" before that "agility".

------
Sindrome
Sounds about right to me. You leave university with an understanding of how
things should be done. But reality is nothing like that. Adapt and move
forward.

I would like to offer one other realization that you need to make early on.
Your bosses are your bosses because they are better at playing politics than
the people that came before them, not because they are more skilled or
talented. The best part of working for a large selective company like MS is
that you get to work with skilled/talented Type A personalities. Start
building your rolodex. This way when you want to move into a director position
or start a company you are miles ahead of everyone else.

Cheers!

------
cheshire137
This article is stupid. "I'm fresh out of school, but take my word that this
is how ALL corporate jobs are". Then his bullet points are depressing. "Expect
the bare minimum, because the bare minimum is A-okay."

------
nrubin
I think it's weird that this person complains about people going home to live
their lives. You know what's awesome about big companies? They know you have a
life and they don't try to get in your way for that. There is life beyond the
work and the office.

Also, Microsoft is a massive company, and this person thinks a single team
reflects the entire company culture? It's a huge company with hundreds of
teams. One team does not define the organization.

This post should be titled "I worked at Azure 8 months out of college and
here's what I learned." That would be a more accurate title.

------
Aardwolf
> If this would have been my own company there would be tons of wiki pages.

Ah how naive :)

> The world outside is not known here a lot. I bet you’re reading what sort of
> latest technologies and tools are out on blogs, Reddit or Hacker News every
> day.

Not reading any tech news sites at all? That is odd, so many developers do.

> Not everybody is fond of latest versions here.

Must be a Windows culture thing. I don't know many Linux users who aren't
using the latest version with all programs often or even automatically
updated. Except some university computer labs using ancient Linux distros like
Mandrake.

------
Smudge
It's important to remember that Microsoft is a HUGE company, and the
experience varies greatly between divisions and organizations, and even
between single products within those orgs.

------
mckilljoy
As others are saying, Microsoft is a very large company with a great deal of
variance in the quality and maturity of teams. I wouldn't consider this
description representative.

Azure is still a comparably new team, so I'm not surprised if it is still
sorting out its processes. I've hear similar descriptions of Bing teams, and
other "startup" divisions in the company.

But there are definitely some brutally effective teams there that far outshine
any other non-Microsoft team I've ever seen.

------
matthiasb
"Expect no documentation in corporations" TechNet has so many valuable
articles! It helps me every day to figure out the issues I have without having
to hire an expert;-)

And I love the Microsoft Test Lab Guides
([http://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/1...](http://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/1262.test-
lab-guides.aspx)) which is continuously updated.

~~~
smackfu
I think it's just internal vs. external documentation. People are paid to
write external docs as their job, so they should be pretty good.

------
iknight
Welcome to the corporate world, where the grass isn't always greener on the
other side.

There is always being an intrapreneur. People are people and can be
influenced. It isn't easy.

~~~
michaelochurch
_There is always being an intrapreneur._

No there is not, in most companies. In most firms, if you try to be an
"intrapreneur" while the middle manager to whom you report has to deal with
typical corporate dreck, you'll break this "Law of Power" (Never Outshine the
Master): [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WMy8Tf-
zCag](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WMy8Tf-zCag) Then you get fired for being
"distracted" because the perception is that you care more about your career
goals than your manager's. (Of course, this is usually true for most people
and there's nothing wrong with that, but one can't be brazen about it.)

There are benefits to working in larger companies, but the idea that one can
just decide one day to recast his job description to "intrapreneur" is
laughable for most people. The people who have jobs that would allow that (in
small or large companies) don't need to fall back on some templated concept.

------
reledi
> In college, I learned code quality is as important as the result, turned out
> wrong.

I'm surprised you learned this in college. My department couldn't care less
about code quality, and in fact they teach a lot of stuff that goes against
the majority of style guides. In an extreme case, I've seen code written by a
senior student that repeated tons of code because he didn't use loops, and he
passed the assignment just fine.

~~~
LeonidasXIV
In my university, I'm pretty sure you can graduate with even decent to good
grades without having written any single program that worked. So maybe this
grind is exactly the right thing for these people.

------
marssaxman
Those are good things to learn. All of them correspond to my own experiences
in large companies; none of them are specific to Microsoft. He is fortunate to
discover this early, with what sounds like a fairly minimal degree of trauma,
so that he can either learn to deal with it or learn to avoid such
environments.

I'll never work for such a company again, that's for sure! Been through it
three times and that's enough to be certain.

------
Kerrick
Duplicate:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5868066](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5868066)

------
arasmussen
Ouch.

> It is not what you do, it is what you sell.

This bothers me. Multiple companies I've worked at have made me want to work
on some sort of Code Quality team to go in and rip apart and rewrite entire
sections of shitty code that won't make any immediate noticeable impact. The
business impact it will make is next time another programmer has to touch that
code it'll take them a tenth the time to understand, use, or extend it.

------
joesb
_> Expect no documentation in corporations. [...] If this would have been my
own company there would be tons of wiki pages._

Yes, it it were your company you would have all you employees write tons of
document instead of working on new project and actually making money, I know
all freelancer and small company have tons of document and run on CMM5.

Wonder why all old CEO never thought of this. They should hire this guy to be
the new CEO.

------
taude
He's probably right about some things; but he's wrong about people having life
outside of work, but that's OK, he's young and his only passion is his code
and growing his career. However, there's something about the tone of this
posting and the sarcastic overtones that I'd probably fire him....if at least
to free him from his corporate shackles so he can go find himself.

------
KennyCason
At least from my experience, corporations had very good documentation and
where I worked we always had constant peer/code reviews. Also if you worked
2-3 hours likely you'd be overrun with work. It's hard to argue with some of
the other points, like "It is all about getting shit done," though I'm
inclined to say that that point is universal to most companies.

------
tnuc
>At the end, you are working for your manager’s and their managers’ paychecks.

You are working to get the shareholders a better share price and dividend
payout.

~~~
marshray
I'm working to climb Maslow's hierarchy and achieve self-actualization.

If managers and stockholders benefit from that, that's cool with me.

------
mncolinlee
This article has me worried for the author. His cut-and-paste comments alone
would drive most corporate legal and PR teams crazy. Normally, this sort of
honest personal blog about corporate culture would be okay inside a corporate
intranet portal, but forbidden when sent to the wider tech universe.

I hope for his sake that he has understanding managers up the chain and a good
second job planned out.

~~~
mtdewcmu
Maybe, but what's wrong with pasting code from one Microsoft project to
another? I think the company would be overreacting. This post could have been
subtitled, "holy cow, this is not college anymore." Most of it sounds like
universal coming-of-age stuff that could have been written about pretty much
anywhere.

------
thehme
Good luck. I hope this was not a mistake to publish, but it is definitely true
of ALL jobs, not just developers or tech in general. I have noticed that it
usually has to do with people being greedy of their knowledge and wanting to
be indispensable. However, many of us have a choice to contribute to this and
other places where we can share info as you said in your post, so thanks.

~~~
marssaxman
It is fortunately _not_ true of all software jobs; if it were, I would have
changed careers a very long time ago. Perhaps I have been lucky, but my
experiences in small companies have generally been much, much better than what
the author describes.

~~~
thehme
You know, you are right about that. I think that you are right about there
being some small companies that are very good and some developers that are
excellent at documenting code, sharing knowledge, etc. All software dev
companies should probably require Code Complete as regular reading and sharing
info should be encouraged as well.

------
stuartd
"Everybody loves finding Stack Overflow answers on search results, but nobody
contributes those answers. I can understand that."

Hmm. I see _lots_ of excellent answers on Stack Overflow from declared
Microsoft engineers, and undoubtedly many more undeclared ones. I think the OP
is extrapolating, but also that s/he may have caught something of the culture
there..

------
jussij
This does read like someone just out of college, working on their first job.

> Every company has its own problems.

Over time you'll find most companies/organisations operate in very similar
ways.

I'd say it's not even specific to the I.T. industry, but rather, just the way
people tend to operate.

It’s the politics of human interaction and the bigger the organisation the
more politics you will find.

------
rajanikanthr
coming from the same company, here are my few thoughts when I was joined on
Day1..i hated that there is no documentation, but learnt about system by
talking to people mostly. and infact no one has given me time to learn. right
now for the stuff I have been doing, i dont have time to document them. in
Agile, my managers are not expecting me to spend time on that. once some user
story satisfy biz. req. they dont want to waste spending time on making
absoutely beautiful code or at least they move to technical debt and never
look at that again.

code reviews can be skipped sometimes, usually I too go by offline review and
checkin. even the people I work with don't give a f __k about open source, HN
/reddit or about competitors. at our level we are there to develop what we are
told to. If you are interested in something you have to spend time after 6PM
at home which is reality in most agile teams. to end 'LIVE WITH IT'

------
joelhaasnoot
I work at a big enterprise and yes, lots of things are familiar. Then again, I
work on a project that's about 5-8 years late, and migration will finally be
completed next week. People are figuring out documentation matters, and large
parts are being properly documented and/or rewritten. There are corporations
where people get it.

------
chudi
I had the same feeling entering my first job, and I think that its not
something about Microsoft it seems to me that its the clash between what we
tough that was work, what were taught that was work in college and what it is
work in the real world.

Nevertheless these points are valid and we all know the problems of this
stuff.

------
thinkersilver
Each time is different. You really should take this down or wait to change
teams after a year and a bit or leave. It sounds like there is serious
disconnect between your expectations and the company culture and what you have
written does not reflect too well on the Azure team.

------
zobzu
All this sounds about right. Sadly. Probably is why companies come and go.
Even big ones, eventually.

------
QEDturtles
It speaks volumes that even the M$ engineers are afraid of new versions of M$
software...

------
m4tthumphrey
Most of these rang true for me and I only work in a 25 personal company. The
biggest one is everyone except me is only there for the 9-5 and the paycheck.
Not one has heard of HN. This is why I start a new job in 2 weeks.

------
wreckimnaked
>I am surprised that no one I met in Windows Azure team heard about Heroku or
Rackspace, which are direct competitors. That’s acceptable, not everybody has
to know these.

Am I the only one that thinks this is completely unacceptable?

~~~
adamconroy
You are probably the only one that believes his statement.

------
gdix
>If this would have been my own company there would be tons of wiki pages.

Ah, to be young and naive again. This is one of those lofty goals that I'm
sure everyone aspires to but absolutely no one really ends up doing.

------
songzme
If you would like to work in a place that embrace new technology and value
great code, TokBox is hiring:
[http://tokbox.com/careers](http://tokbox.com/careers)

:)

------
adamconroy
I thought this post was mildly interesting until I hit this statement :

"I am surprised that no one I met in Windows Azure team heard about Heroku or
Rackspace"

Aside from the obvious ambiguities, this simply cannot be true.

------
weland
This is one of the things that has always bugged me.

I've had my share of work in a-large-company-i-shall-not-name. In my
experience, given higher tiers that are receptive enough (read: people with
technical backgrounds and some technical experience -- not necessarily
glorious, even some QBASIC hacking is ok) and team members that are not
mediocre, this stuff can be helped. Even in large companies. Not in all
departments, not in all teams, but it can be different -- although the
technical challenges involved in doing it "right" are insignificant compared
to the non-technical ones.

Most of it seems to stem from the fact that, while large companies are very
eager to enforce non-technical compliance (sometimes to unhealthy extremes,
where they value conformance over performance), technical discipline is not as
eagerly enforced. The same people who, in virtue of their hunger for
promotion, would ship anything that compiles and seems to work, will tolerate
any amount of crap. If enough team leaders, product managers, department heads
and, in general, enough people who are not directly responsible for code they
write, regularly contribute mediocre technical solutions, no one will ever get
sanctioned for mediocrity, just for outright failure.

That being said, I would personally fire any _manager_ responsible for the
following:

> Expect no documentation in corporations. I have seen the knowledge inside
> the company is mostly transferred by talking and hands-on sessions.

If this happens, things are fucked up beyond recovery. If a company can afford
to budget weeks and weeks of paperpushing for approving the first draft of the
approval form for the architecture, they can afford extra time for proper
documentation. When this happens, it's often a symptom of middle management
wanking it until the upper management begins thrusting the hierarchical cock
down their ass, and then immediately raining all responsibility down on the
technical layers, which cannot rain it on anything else.

I can't claim that the teams I worked in had brilliant, completely up-to-date
documentation, but it was good enough that newcomers had to begin pouring
questions only when they actually struck tough code for the first time. In
exchange for that, we treated blatantly missing or out-of-date documentation
like any other bug -- we had timeframes for fixing it and people who were
being paid to do it. I never had anyone from the upper layers ever complain
about it. They were reluctant at first, but then, when the new employees who
were handed over to our team were up to their necks in code after two weeks,
whereas their equally recently-hired colleagues were still attending training
sessions, no one had any chance of unhappiness anymore.

> 2-3 hours of coding a day is great.

2-3 hours of coding a day, for everyone in the team, every day of the week, is
something the team leader should be strangled for. Slowly. In several stages.
Just before moving to the micromanagement-obsessed higher layers.

Non-technical/upper-management hated me for it, but every Monday I screamed,
yelled and kicked and any necessary, but unproductive bullshit they had for us
was scheduled either on Monday, or on Friday. Technical meetings were always
scheduled at least one day in advance (well, whenever possible, but it rarely
wasn't).

At the end of the week, one day was definitely wasted, but I made it a goal
that we get at least one day a week when we can do nothing but code. If the
people who like meetings can get a day -- fuck, can get _every_ day of the
week -- when they can have meetings from the first hour of work to the last
hour of overtime, coders deserve a day where they can do nothing but code.
Yes, it results in people hating you. It also results in them not being able
to do squat about it.

> The world outside is not known here a lot. [...] It’s not common here. I am
> surprised that no one I met in Windows Azure team heard about Heroku or
> Rackspace, which are direct competitors. That’s acceptable, not everybody
> has to know these.

This is very, very, very wrong, it's wrong beyond words. Not _having heard_
about the competition -- especially in such a trendy thing -- is a symptom of
your people not being familiar with the technology they develop. Not cool.
Someone in Recruiting had to meet a recruitment quota. You can't make racing
games with people who don't know there are other racing games beyond those
they develop, and they most certainly cannot be creative if what everyone else
calls "reinventing the wheel" is "new development" to them.

That isn't to say everyone has to have a perfect picture about the
competition, their strong points and weak points and so on. That's what the
Marketing and Sales folks are paid for. But a lot of things, from motivating
people to exploring new features, is difficult -- hell, if you ask me, it's
impossible -- if they don't have a full picture of the field they play on.
It's like fielding a football team and asking them to play against an unknown
team, blindfolded.

> It is all about getting shit done in corporations. [...] As long as that
> functionality is ready, it is okay and can always be fixed later.

Windows Azure is just three years old IIRC. Let them bask in their Getting
Things Done attitude for another ten years. Either their developers will get
their shit together, or three quarters of the team will be interns, new
employees who have no idea what they got themselves into, people who just
couldn't be made to fit anywhere else but the company is afraid to fire over
crackpots' lawsuits and a horde of business majors to run the project.

Don't get me wrong -- both the approaches I outlined and the ones presented in
the article can be equally lucrative under the right management, and the
supply of teachers' pets eager to climb the corporate ladder will always be
drawn towards the fiery chasm of companies like Microsoft. Hell, even smart
_and_ brave folks will do it, thinking they will be able to take it an fit in,
will try it -- I've done it myself, twice even (in true experimental science
way). But the one this guy talks about tends to drive away most of the smart,
dedicated, creative people. You can run a corporation on corporate drones, but
your market leader position will constantly be usurped by technical
shortcomings, even among brilliant products, and constantly be saved only by
savvy business tactics. Profitable (even in the long term), but sorrily futile
in the greater picture of things.

------
vbv
I have a gut feeling that you work as an SDET. I have been through the same
experience in my first 2 years. SDETs go through a very different experience
as compared to a PM or SDE at Microsoft.

------
poxrud
Thank you for posting. I think you will inspire a lot of younger devs to seek
more meaningful employment than working for big corp. However I fear that you
will lose your job over this post.

------
Kiro
This post is spot on and applies to more companies than you can imagine.
Reading Hacker News gives you a really skewed view of how things work and how
people think in the software business.

~~~
dk8996
I completely agree. Even late stage startup will begin to look more like what
the blogger has described. The blogger should gain some exp and move on to a
small/early stage startup or find a way to move in to R&D role within
Microsoft -- these positions normally offer more freedom and greefields.

------
jongraehl
Great writing - we really feel along with you ("and that's okay"). It's
terrible to care and work with people who don't. Find a new team (in MS or out
of it).

------
greghinch
So is this his "I quit" post? Because it doesn't seem like his superiors are
going to be very pleased with this post..

------
coldskull
perfectly describes some of the top mobile/chipset companies i have worked
for. Some of the code is so horrible that you feel it might be worth the time
rewriting it. But time is too precious...nobody has time to step back and
analyze or point fingers. just get the code fix and ship to it the customer.

------
thirsday
All those things that he wrapped up with "and that's ok." How exactly are they
ok?

~~~
rajanikanthr
ultimately one needs paycheck.. Its not easy to switch to the ultimate company
which is perfect according to his ideologies when you have wife/kids..

------
IzzyMurad
If I were Bill Gates, I'd fire you without blinking an eye.

------
mrwnmonm
i wonder if working at google is the same?

------
pasbesoin
Yep.

------
omniwired
sad panda

------
venomsnake
Publishing something that HR/PR can consider slander under your real name
while being junior developer is not a recipe for stable employment. These guys
tend to freak out over minor stuff like that.

Lets hope it does not have negative consequences.

Otherwise familiar - these companies are like supertankers - move slowly and
few people are empowered to make meaningful decisions and contributions.
Worked for a few years in a telecom ... it was meetings, meetings, meetings,
signing contracts with delivery dates before the day they we signed, absurd
promises, turf war and NIMBY.

From now on - 20-50 person companies for me only, unless I am at the very top.

~~~
ngoel36
I spent two summers interning as a Program Manager at Microsoft (Xbox and
Office), and his statements are nearly 100% accurate:

\- Literally any piece of documentation was always 1+ years out of date.
Setting up a dev environment could take days when it should have only taken
hours.

\- A lot of my coworkers were over 35. Starkly different from my experience
later at Google. Working past 6 was considered absurd, and a lot of people
were perfectly happy just riding the Microsoft wave. There were plenty of
engineers who had been at the company 12-18 years with only a single promotion
or two.

\- I actually was able to do some open source work with Codeplex

\- Not a single person I worked with read HN or Reddit, that I knew of.

It's a bit depressing reading the post, but at the end of the day Microsoft
was and is still an amazing place to work. I was paid well, the engineers are
well taken care of, and the consumer offerings are still fun and exciting.

Although things were done differently than they are done in Silicon Valley,
the difference is not necessarily bad, perhaps more eye-opening. This is how
MOST computer science majors spend their careers. Not mastering MongoDB,
collaborating on Google Spreadsheets, or posting things to HN, but using
Windows XP, Visual Studio, and Microsoft Word 2003 on a 2008 Lenovo laptop.
And MS is perfectly happy taking their money.

~~~
jmduke
_Although things were done differently than they are done in Silicon Valley,
the difference is not necessarily bad, perhaps more eye-opening. This is how
MOST computer science majors spend their careers. Not mastering MongoDB,
collaborating on Google Spreadsheets, or posting things to HN, but using
Windows XP, Visual Studio, and Microsoft Word 2003 on a 2008 Lenovo laptop.
And MS is perfectly happy taking their money._

I think this is a dangerous line of logic that leads to equating 'new' with
'important.' I think once you get to the point where you judge someone for the
tools they use or the sites they browse you go down a pretty negative path.
It's shockingly easy to forget how much of the world runs on J2EE and ASP.net.

~~~
nealabq
It's curiosity that's important, not new stuff. We read HN because we're
curious, and we don't want to miss anything. We don't get stuck on old
inferior tools (at least not at home) because we like to tinker and explore.
You can judge people, to some extent, based on their reading, their tools, how
informed they are about the competition. Programming is like surfing a tidal
wave of information and change; you don't improve by sticking your head in the
sand.

(Yeah, that last sentence is a tidal wave of mixed metaphore tossed like a
salad.)

~~~
ownagefool
Programming is more like surfing an infinite amount of tidal waves of
information change. Every wave is different, but ultimately they're all just
waves regardless of how much people argue which is superior to the other.

Point being, when you're 35 and an expert in your field, you probably need to
spend less time learning what the cool kids are up to as opposed to when
you're 23 and learning your field and everything you learn is new.

That doesn't mean that you can let yourself not be current, but if your future
plans are to work 12 hours per day then go home and read HN at night, I pity
your wife and family prospects. :p

------
michaelochurch
I am going to be really curious to find out how this plays out for OP. I don't
know anything about MSFT, but it's a courageous and insightful post that
underlines many of the awful truths about typical corporate programming.

The nonsense (endless meetings, anti-intellectualism, lack of passion) is
_why_ so many people check out for good around 40. I really hate the
stereotype that that's normal, though; I go to Lisp meetups and fairly often
run into people in their 50s to 70s who are still passionate about technology.

I want to know, now and in 6 months, where the OP ends up. I'm not going to
get into more detail than this, but one learns a lot (about others,
organizations, and oneself) through whistleblowing.

------
dschiptsov
The only intention of a bureaucrat is to keep and strengthen his's position,
that's why they do meetings and paper pushing and finger-pointing most of the
time - just to cover his ass and survive to the end-of-year bonus.

It is so obvious (and ridiculous) that nginx has more market share than IIS
precisely because of lack of meetings and design documents.))

