Hacker News Reader

Comment by endtime | Hacker News Reader

Having worked at Microsoft should get you an interview just about anywhere. And anyone who considers it a negative is, frankly, an idiot.

View on HN

Seriously? Working at MSFT can be a huge negative for us, for three specific reasons: * an entirely different software stack from the operating system to the web servers to the databases to the programming languages to the dev tools;

* I've interviewed 3 different people from MSFT that were experts in eg a tiny area of DCOM; as startup needs generalists;

* a 30 person company is nothing like a 30K or 60K or whatever they're up to these days and it seems that people comfortable in one are often not comfortable in the other.

Regarding point 3, MS isn't so much a 60K company as it is a coalition of variously sized groups, usually from a few hundreds up to low thousands.

During my 4.5 years I haven't worked on anything but incubation projects. Meaning I have never been on a team with more than 20 full time employees.

I'm not saying you should hire anyone with MS on his resume. If someone doesn't want to work for a startup, don't hire him. If you think someone is overspecialized, don't hire him. But if your policy is just not to hire anyone who's worked for a big company, you're losing out...and even in that case, your prejudice is against all big companies, not Microsoft.

If someone's worked for Microsoft, it means he's probably smart and probably has experience working with other smart people to release real software. That's exactly the kind of person I'd want to work with.

None of these really seem particular to Microsoft.

The first two should never get through a resume filter, and the last seems something to be caught in an interview. Are you saying you wouldn't hire someone from Google because that company is too big?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com