
Bada Bing, Bada Boom: Culture inside Bing - xpaulbettsx
http://worldofsu.com/philipsu/?p=209
======
eric_boyd
What an odd blog post!

I've been on the Bing Ads side for the past two years. I overlapped with
Philip very briefly at MSFT. When I started, he was working in a group that
had nothing to do with Bing. I had a couple pretty positive email exchanges
and generally thought highly of the guy, but certainly didn't know him well.

Today, out of the blue, about a year after he left MSFT, he writes a scathing
critique of a culture that he hasn't been a part of for 3+ years (I don't
honestly know when he was at Bing), and writes about it in the present tense
without any clarification that the events are in the past. On his Facebook
post, Philip comments that the test director incident happened 5 years ago.
His blog reads like it happened last week.

Qi Lu joined MSFT less than 3 years ago to take over Bing and all of online
services. When Qi took it on, it was called Live Search. It had been losing
market share every month for years. Since Bing launched, it's market share has
risen every month. It's quite possible that the culture Philip worked in was
every bit as broken as he describes. But the team I work in, I can speak to it
being a fantastic place to work now. Qi has been upgrading the talent top down
and now I find it filled with very smart people making real progress, both in
the quality of the search engine, and in the market share gains over the past
two years.

Are there still some political people? Of course, every large organization has
them. But the company Philip writes about doesn't sound like the one I work
in.

Obvious disclaimer about the fact that I'm a current employee and thus biased.

~~~
prostoalex
"Though it’s been several years since I left, I still remember Bing as the
time when I most despaired for Microsoft’s future."

There's a slight hint that it has been several years since he left. It's not
completely obvious, as it's hidden all the way in paragraph #1.

------
jonnathanson
_"People look out for themselves when there’s nothing to look forward to."_

This is what it all comes down to, whether at Bing, or at any other large
organization. The other bullet points on Philip's list are fine, but this one
is perhaps wholly sufficient. Politics exists in every organization. And every
organization has some folks who are more Machiavellian than others. But all of
this crap comes to the forefront, amplified and accelerated, when an
organization is in turmoil. (And that atmosphere of turmoil usually trickles
down from the top; a divisional leader who's always politicking and
maneuvering inspires his lieutenants to do the same, and on and on it goes).

I've had the distinct displeasure of working for at least three large
divisions of megagiant companies in varying degrees of peril or stagnation,
and all three of them -- despite wildly different corporate cultures and
people -- became similar hotbeds of political intrigue. Declining quarterlies
led to re-orgs, and re-orgs led to chaos, and chaos bred more chaos. And in
this crucible people forged schemes, machinations, alliances, and double-
crosses that would make _A Game of Thrones_ look like a Dr. Seuss book.

This phenomenon is notable because the same people, operating in the same
groups, did _not_ behave so politically in better times. Like I said, I'm sure
that a few of them were always plotting and conniving. But only when the
division went into steady decline did the sheep cast off their clothing and
reveal the wolves beneath.

~~~
hello_moto
It comes down to: survival instinct.

On average people take irrational approaches while a small number of people
would stay calm, stick with their integrity, and let time decides.

~~~
gaius
Easy to see this every day. Where I live, if the trains are running on time,
everyone is perfectly polite, helps people with their luggage, always says
"no, after you" and so on. When the trains are fucked, people become feral and
climb over each other to get on, as no-one knows when the next one will
come...

~~~
hello_moto
... the truth right there ...

I can tell you that after living in one of the friendliest place on the
planet, people still behave like this (wrt to train/subway).

------
hello_moto
Programmers think that they hate politics but when it comes down to the actual
technical stuff, they do politics as well.

Some programmers want to be "relevant" in the HN sense so they push new
technology that they just picked up last week religiously (node.js for a CRUD
app, which most websites are anyway, comes to mind) like it is the next big
thing.

Or they just read 37Signals books and drank the 37Signals + RoR kool-aid and
push 100% 37Signals mindset to the workplace that doesn't fit with that
(different target, client base, market, etc). Come back in 3 years time and
you'll see the same guy pushing for MVC in client-side/browser as opposed to
stick with simplicity yet still pushing 37Signals mindset whenever he refused
to do work that doesn't inline with him for whatever reasons (laziness, or
else).

Or perhaps they came back from Agile meeting and think that Scrum is the only
way to run a project that everybody else must follow it. (Hint: Scrum is hard
to understand and to apply to a large group of people who don't know Scrum
100%). On the flip side, cowboy coders hate a single addition of "process"
even if that process is called Continuous Integration. They'll do whatever it
takes to make sure they can continue to code like cowboys.

Even the unit-test debate can be considered as politics. Some people want the
company to rely on themselves so they prefer no unit-tests. Programmers are
notorious with locking in the knowledge in their brain only hence no unit-
tests, no documentations. Just Read The F... Code they say. C'mon, don't give
me excuses that these are useless except for your weekend projects. We all
know that most startups develop from prototypes. They almost rarely re-write
their main (with odd codebase) products.

... more reasons to be an indie developer I suppose...

~~~
rbanffy
When I am faced with colleagues like the ones you describe, I, as politely as
possible, point out we have an HR problem. I have a good relationship with my
HR people and I hope this kind of input goes somewhere.

Truth is, the larger the organization, the lower the chances of hiring only
the best people (and even the best can be corrupted by the bad apples). At
some point, your average will approach society's median, which is pretty bad.

------
sriramk
For those who may not know Philip.

I worked with Philip shortly back at MSFT. He was one of my favorite people
and had all the right core values one would ever want. Someone who got stuff
done and cared about it. I thought losing him to FB was a terrible loss for
MSFT (he went on to do the FB/Skype integration almost single-handedly). He is
not just another disgruntled employee, he is someone MSFT needs to listen to.

No comment on the stuff on Bing. Or Yahoo :).

~~~
sid6376
He also wrote a great exit mail when leaving MS.
<http://worldofsu.com/philipsu/?page_id=193> .

~~~
justanotheratom
Found this gem in the exit mail, which contrasts with the theme of the current
blog post. Then again, maybe he has more clarity now than a year ago.

"Stay away from people who always have a conspiracy theory involving twisted
office politics, unfulfilled Machiavellian ambitions, and unspoken agendas."

------
mynameishere
_unless Google, like most of Microsoft’s previous competitors, summarily
shoots itself via a series of disastrous decisions_

It's possible. Corporations change. The difference in quality is slight, but
google has been making some ludicrous mistakes lately (IMHO, obviously):

1\. Google instant. This is such shit I can hardly believe it. Yeah, I can
turn it off, but the average person is going to be charmed by the gimmick of
it without realizing how awful it is. On unfamiliar computers, I go to bing
automatically.

2\. The disinclusion of search terms. This happened all the time pre-google,
and now it's happening at google with every query. You have to affix a plus
sign on every term if you want it actually searched. Again, normal people are
unaware.

3\. The debasement of the brand. I'm talking about the non-stop cutesy-pie
logos. What if Coke did this?

4\. Very public flops outside their area of expertise. Google+, etc.

...these four things aren't going to hurt google too much, but they tell me
that the lunatics are now in charge.

~~~
andrewflnr
I don't particularly like Google Instant, but I'm curious why you hate it so
much. How is it so awful?

~~~
xpaulbettsx
I personally find it awful in Chrome because they don't handle the
autocomplete experience correctly, and I always end up searching for what they
complete instead of what I wanted which happened to be a prefix of it.

~~~
deleo
Google instant is good for tablets/phones, not for desktop computers. Too bad
they rolled it out to everybody I don't like it too much either, but can live
with it.

------
rachelbythebay
I decided to do a test and switched my in-browser search bar to Bing. So far,
I haven't had any reason to object. I still get results which do what I want.

Also, I could swear that Bing Maps is actually faster than Google in terms of
loading tiles, scrolling around, and all of that. Google Maps just sticks at
times, for some reason. It's amazing to see it fall so far, considering that
smooth-scrolling maps at Google is what brought me over from Mapquest years
ago.

I'd love to see someone continue the result comparisons with the brands filed
off. It might surprise people.

~~~
lordgilman
Someone did a blind test with Yahoo, Google and Bing two years ago. Here's one
of the HN discussions over it. IIRC things got shut down a few days later
because of trolls.

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=646101>

~~~
hyperrail
No, no, it's still up: <http://blindsearch.fejus.com/>

------
Cherian_Abraham
From the post: Yet the same people who led the 30-person MSN Search team
retained key leadership positions in the 3,000-person Bing team. How, exactly,
does this happen?

I would say, more often than not when you work in large corporations where
either teams have grown uncontrollably, or where certain people who happened
to be present in key positions early, has enough clout organizationally to
warrant the same position even when the team grows or its responsibilities
grow.

I have seen where consulting firms at Client organizations, where the Team
Lead on the first client project who is managing three developers end up being
the Program manager years later overseeing 40-50 consultants, with no real
leadership experience.

~~~
hello_moto
Years later he manage 40-50 consultants. Looks like he's expanding his
portfolio. What is wrong with that? :)

Are you saying he can't scale?

What is "leadership" experience anyway since most execs these days only care
about money and more bonuses...Gone are the days of execs working for the
company and mentoring his underlings.

But then again, execs know the game as good as anybody else: board members
will cut execs at any time they want in favour of bigger cut of the pie of the
company's profit anyway.

------
jmillikin
Independent of the post, does anybody else find the OCCASIONAL BOLD PHRASES
very distracting? I can't make up my mind whether to READ THEM WITH EMHPASIS,
as one might hear in verbal speech, or try to find a CLEVER HIDDEN MESSAGE
from the author.

~~~
gfodor
It's Atwood-style, and I definitely find it really distracting. Every series
of bold words is read by the voice in my head loudly and toneless, the way
Americans yell English to foreigners.

~~~
blasdel
I'm pretty sure Atwood cribbed that wholesale from Jakob Nielsen's ancient
advise: <http://www.useit.com/papers/webwriting/>

But Atwood is truly inane in his own special way:
<http://secretgeek.net/jatwood_how_to.asp>

------
dreamux
Anyone have a link to the study referenced in here which says people prefer
bing results to google's when logos are reversed? This seems like something
MSFT's marketing department would be trumpeting at every opportunity...

EDIT: The closest I've found is this - <http://blindsearch.fejus.com/> which
lets users vote up anonymous result sets. However, the last reported numbers
(from 2009) show Google in the lead. Oh well.

~~~
kenjackson
I think they were internal studies, from the way it read in the article.

~~~
moultano
One thing I've always wondered is if every search company looks better than
their competitors on their own metrics. Seems totally plausible given how many
different ways there are to define metrics, and how different the types of
queries that each search engine receives might be.

~~~
wanorris
Sometimes you know you're getting a beatdown and your metrics reflect it. Your
goal is to simply close the distance over time.

But one thing that happens is that if you decide a metric is important and
make it a KPI, you are then trying to implement features based on their
ability to "move the needle" on that KPI. So if you are effective at meeting
goals, you tend to improve on that KPI (the one you are testing for
improvement on) more than you do on some other metric that you are not
measuring your performance against.

So yes, if different competitors are using different metrics, they're likely
to each perform the best on their own metrics.

------
rafaelferreira
The post starts out sending a disgruntled-employee vibe, but it improves later
on. The OP conjectures about how an organization becomes more heavily
political than the rest of a company are pretty interesting.

------
nostrademons
Are there seriously 3000 people working on Bing?

~~~
rbanffy
I think the point of the post was that there are about 2800 people on Bing who
are playing political games while the remaining 200 work on a search engine.

------
bconway
_I once witnessed a debate between two leaders in Bing about whether Microsoft
network proxies should be modified to redirect all employee traffic targeted
at Google towards Bing instead. Never mind that employees were using Google;
someone actually thought the way to win was to force them to use Bing. “I
know, we’ll make them use it!”_

I love this mentality. With everyone else, it's dogfooding and is a highly
recommended practice, especially here on HN. With Microsoft, it's forcing your
employees to use something against their will.

------
foxit
The question I have after reading this post is: What about his NDA? At a
higher level, do they not demand signing of those? I certainly had one.

------
pcj
Any insights on how this (sustaining a healthy and positive culture with
growth) is handled in Google/Apple/even Facebook?

------
parallel
Apologies in advance for making a fairly trivial observation but I really like
this guys use of bold in the text. It's a little like a tabloid newspaper but
I found that it genuinely added to the writing making it more readable and
more amusing.

------
ck2
_did you know that employees yodel at the end of their company meetings_

Sure hope that is voluntary or they have the Walmart management of the web.
(google "walmart cheer")

------
jroseattle
I found Philip's article to be remarkably uninteresting. He observed political
machinations in a large company -- what a shock! I don't care if he has been
out of the space for 3 years, or if he's in the middle of it today -- he
didn't identify anything about organizational behavior that isn't already
known. Move along, nothing to see here....

