Why Your Startup Shouldn't Hire a Marketer from Microsoft

Conversely you may find a person who, when free of the political, hierarchical, and prone to play it safe environment that is Microsoft marketing (or many departments in many large corp's), will become a fantastic hire and combine their new found responsibility with years of experience to completely out-manouver companies with far bigger budgets.

At the end of the day, if you place more weight on a the employment history of the candidate than the person, you may as well just flip a coin when determining whether they will meet your needs.

Very to the point. I got in the wrong way, I am a startup marketer currently in a large company, and trust me it's nuts. The one thing people think about last is selling. Everything is about the running political score and I just don't get it. We have marketers who make 210K sitting around doing nothing much, even worse, they aren't interested in technology or the stuff they sell. Damn man, it sux, the money is good for the while though.

Good overview, but it's important to keep in mind that there are definitely some very talented people at Microsoft that have their creativity and talents strangled to death by layers of horrible management.

Reading some of these blogs about Microsoft's internal culture (Mini-Microsoft and others) illustrates this pretty clearly and makes for very fascinating reading.

Reasonable enough to say that people with big-company backgrounds often have expectations that amount to "first I'll hire 4 people to do the job you are expecting me to."

I would hire someone from Microsoft over someone from IBM any day. But I agree, I'd rather try and find some disgruntled Yahoo worker and at this point that ought to be easier.

From personal experience, all four of the Microsoft marketing employees I've interacted with have been complete tools.

The daily Microsoft bashing HN post. There are literally thousands of startups started by ex-Microsoft marketers, developers, sales people and they are doing great. Microsoft is definitely doing great as well.

People are smart and can adapt. They will fight for politics and budget in big organization and they will get work done at startups. Labeling someone as "non-hire" just because they worked in Microsoft is plain stupid. Neglecting so much success and real on the field experience - definitely not smart.

By the way, using the same logic - marketers from Google and Facebook shoud not be hired too? Or this will not appeal to the HN community, no Microsoft, so noone to hate.

Of course reading the OP author bio confirms that - senior positions at Siebel, IBM, etc - they are obviously THAT MUCH different from Microsoft, really. So much hypocrisy. So much bullshit.

Come on.

I am really amazed by the irony in the writer's bio:

"I’ve held senior positions at large global companies including IBM, Nortel, Siebel Systems (the world’s leading provider of CRM solutions acquired by Oracle), and Sybase..."