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Comment by Theodores | Hacker News Reader

Reminds me of the time I visited Microsoft's 'campus' in the UK - in a posh business park near to Reading, with nice views over the Thames.

I was expecting the place to be filled with boffins and assorted geniuses, but instead there were sales account managers for things like Microsoft Golf - didn't realise that you would have regional sales executives, e.g. for the 'south west of England' for such products. Then there were bean counters with licencing to get right, but no 'boffins'.

I felt that I had accidentally been on the 'Golgafrinchan Ark Fleet Ship B; for the day.

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Sales offices and R&D offices are often separated. When I worked for Microsoft china, there was a nice office down the street from where I lived that I couldn't work at because it was for sales and biz people. The CEO of Microsoft china would also send everyone, including R&D, awkward emails about "making their numbers". It was like another world I only had a glimpse into.

Wow, between the techie, Brit, and geek language in this comment I'd love to show it to an American layman and watch the parse errors.

The "boffins" are over at the Microsoft research units, there's one in Cambridge and one in Edinburgh at least.

Surely, Microsoft needs one or two people to write the code for Windows, and can't rely on Microsoft Research for that.

Thames Valley Park is a sales & marketing office. There's a consulting services presence there too, but that really just supports sales & marketing. They do some cool stuff sometimes in the Microsoft Technology Centre though.

They always seemed to have quite a lot of games testers there as well(used to recruit for contract MS workers for Reading and London)

They used to do product development but nowadays it's all sales and marketing. The game testers the other commenter is talking about is centralized testing for Microsoft's remaining game studios. It's not very 'posh' either, at least when I was there, quite dated 90s looking offices. I think Microsoft development in general seems to heavily focused in basically the US and India. Exceptions of course, there's acquisitions like Skype and plenty of other examples dotted around but this place is hardly a 'campus' compared to Redmond or IDC.

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