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...