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Comment by pedalpete | Hacker News Reader

I've never read a post by Richard before, I don't want to seem like I'm giving him a hard time, and I'm a happy Windows user, so I'm a big fan of his work.

But this article isn't inspiring from a developer perspective. I've worked in a big IT department (300 people I think),as well as start-ups, so I'm not completely blind to the structures of different work environments.

When Richard first mentioned that everybody has an office, and that he was allowed to paint his, I thought about how uninspiring that is. Same with describing his hardware. Maybe it's just me, maybe it's Richard, but this article did very little to inspire me to go work for Microsoft.

I was hoping for some insight into code planning, the specific challenges faced by building the most popular (at least the most heavily used) desktop consumer operating system.

Richard makes it all sound very routine.

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Microsoft treats developers very well. From offices, to hardware, to free gym memberships and health care coverage, to the idea that you're generally not expected to work more than 40 hours a week, it's all great. But that can't and doesn't replace the need for healthy corporate culture and good, intelligent, pragmatic leadership, a lot of which has increasingly been lacking at MS. You'll have a quad core desktop with 8 gigs of RAM, but that hardly helps you play the game of office politics that is often required to get bonuses or promotions (when the company bothers to provide them). It also doesn't help a corporate culture that is becoming increasingly bureaucratic and process oriented rather than results oriented.

A lot of talent is and has been evaporating up and out of Microsoft for just these reasons.

I was at Microsoft for two internships and two fulltime years. I never once had an office to myself, I always had to share. In fact, the new Studios buildings are almost entirely "6 packs" of cubicles.

As for hardware, if you really needed it we were able to get it, but there was a fair bit of scavenging for spare parts to power build/test machines. There was also a shortage of Xbox and especially Win Phone dev kits.

My day to day coding experience varied wildly by task. Some stuff had a 2 minute turnaround, most stuff 2 hours, and some stuff several days.

The politics, infighting, and Redmond isolationism are all very real, and very painful.

That said, the company is huge, so experiences differ broadly across the various orgs.

In the office I work out of only managers have private offices. There are also a few small offices with 2-4 people, but most work in groups of 6-10.

Dude... That is still better than work environment I had to endure - 50 developers in a single open area. If that weren't enough - someone decided to sit support for an entire team in the middle of this space, rationale being "that they would like to be close".

6-10 people in a room as long as they are developers is still awesome and productive environment.

Edit: I don't work for Microsoft - but wouldn't mind to :)

When the first few lines tell me about how surprised I will be, I expected to hear that people are encouraged to be creative, take risks, try working on project that might end up going nowhere -- in other words, that they promote a hacker culture.

Unfortunately, the things that the author focused on are not inspiring. Being able to paint your office? Great, but how about week-long hackathons where people can code on whatever they want?

Showing the three-level branch hierarchy of your repository doesn't seem to tell me a great story about what it's like to be a dev at MS. Not because there's anything wrong with the branch structure; if you work at a place where coders are given a lot of liberty and freedom, there should be more interesting things to talk about.

EDIT: he has another post which talks more about culture and projects here: http://foredecker.wordpress.com/2011/02/27/working-at-micros...

>> Great, but how about week-long hackathons where people can code on whatever they want? Showing the three-level branch hierarchy of your repository doesn't seem to tell me a great story about what it's like to be a dev at MS. Not because there's anything wrong with the branch structure; if you work at a place where coders are given a lot of liberty and freedom, there should be more interesting things to talk about.

I guess those can be counted as special cases and not pertaining to day-to-day working. The main point to gain from the post it seems is that its not a pain to work in such a complex environment. This is not some web or phone app, its a huge undertaking and how it works in a precise routine.

I have heard that people at MS do something called "app week". This appears to be a week between milestones where you take a week to build something that can be built in a week. Usually just tangentially related to their product. Maybe this author can talk about that at some point.

My team (XNA Game Studio) had App Week once or twice each year. By far my favorite time spent at Microsoft.

The XNA team is full of ex-game developers because working on platforms at Microsoft has much better "work life balance" than game studios. The stuff that I, and the other team members, created were always cool/fun/hilarious/weird/etc. It was like a week long game jam ending with a Friday afternoon "Think and Drink" where everyone showed off their creations and talked about the good, the bad, and the ugly of our own technology through their App Week experiences.

Again very dependent on the team. I've been in teams which specifically carved out time for this and also been in teams where prototyping/building crazy stuff was something you did all the time.

> Richard makes it all sound very routine.

To me, that is the most impressive part of all.

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