Aging Microsoft lures young tech idealists | Hacker News Reader

Aging Microsoft lures young tech idealists

reuters.com

57 pointsTDL60 comments

"... Of course, back then the sense of mission was boosted by the fact that Microsoft stock increased 90-fold in the 1990s, creating a host of stock option millionaires. Those days are long over, and Microsoft shares are still well below their 1999 peak.

The idea that the company can embody a start-up spirit at this stage of its development might also be a stretch. A recent book published anonymously by two former Microsoft employees, called ‘Stack Rank This!', portrays a company beset by abusive managers and dysfunctional teams where the appraisal process - the notorious stack rank system - actually works against the company's progress."

Smaller, self-contained teams like Bing and Xbox are/were allegedly insular enough to foster such a spirit.

I'm 26 - have worked at Microsoft since I was 24.

Microsoft recruited me off of Hacker News after my first startup failed and it's been a great place for me to learn and develop.

One great thing about Microsoft: I've been able to advance and take on bigger / more interesting projects without my young age being held against me. I can't stress how much I appreciate that after having been in environments where that wasn't the case.

+1. I left for Microsoft from a failed startup, and found a home in Azure. Microsoft is a huge company, with lots of great products to work on. I have met some of the smartest people her.e Generalizing Microsoft is like generalizing a country like the United States - are you talking about rural Michigan or Brooklyn? There is definitely monoculture (meetings! lots of email!), but it's not as pervasive as some might think. Aaron we should meet up (baslam)!

Sounds good - I'll hit you up on the GAL, although I'm based out of LA :p

> I'm 26 - have worked at Microsoft since I was 24.

Please, share with us your wisdom. :-)

Aww come on :(

2 years isn't really that long. Well, it is when you're young, I suppose, but once you get over the mid-20's, you're going to start seeing time speed up quite a deal.

Check back again in 10 years. Its not so far off .. ;)

Given that the thread pertained to college interns, I thought it would have validated my experience >:(

This is my second internship at Microsoft. I worked on Office last year and now I'm working on Windows Live (though it gets kind of hairy since WL is getting killed off and really my team interfaces directly with Win8 so I think of it as just building Windows services).

This is why I like Microsoft:

* You get to impact the lives of millions and millions of people. I find this really cool. I can't wait for Office 15 to come out and be able to see people in my class or on the bus or whatever using features I made. You feel a big (and mixed) sense of responsibility and pride. What we are doing really does matter. If you fuck up, millions of people are going to be affected. If you do an amazing job, the same thing happens but in a positive way. Just think about that for a second.

* Microsoft is virtually involved in every market. Want to make an OS? Go work on Windows. Now you're working on a product with ~85% marketshare. That's pretty cool right? Want a change? Want to see what it's like to work on a product that is the underdog? Go have some fun in Windows Phone. After that, if you want to give search engines a try go ahead and work at Bing. If that doesn't work out, you literally have so many other options (Xbox, Azure, Surface, Visual Studio, Office, IE, etc.)

* You can really feel that you're in an atmosphere of extremely bright and intelligent people (for the most part). This keeps you extremely motivated in case for whatever reason the above things aren't enough.

* While this may seem silly and very minor compared to the above points, it's pretty fracking (sorry been watching BSG) cool to use software before it gets revealed or released to the masses. Knowing secrets is fun :)

> This is my second internship at Microsoft. I worked on Office last year and now I'm working on Windows Live

real talk: have you ever worked on an 'embrace, extend, extinguish'[1] feature or are rank-and-file engineers shielded from that? the only microsofties I know worked at MSR and from what I understand that is a much different environment than actual microsoft. kind of curious what it's actually like in there[2].

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend_and_extinguish

[2] I tend toward the side of linux zealot so I'm trying to soften my tone here

I can't speak for the grandparent, but I've encountered zero of the famous mindset here. There is a definite competitive nature, but customer needs, not business rivals, are what are pushed to even the lowest devs. I'm working on something that is pretty much an internal tool, but the level of emphasis of being able to use it for modeling the needs of real customers is quite high.

You should realize that even though MSFT was not the nicest company in the industry in the past, Embrace, extend and extinguish happened almost two decades ago and stuff like that does not really happen anymore (at least I cannot think of anything, but correct me if I'm wrong).

"You get to impact the lives of millions and millions of people."

That, plus "knowing secrets" was the coolest part of my time at MS. But after several years working on Win7 and Win8, I hated my job, and every week I thank my stars that I'm working elsewhere now. The bureaucracy was stifling and the product lifecyle is an eternity of sitting and waiting for plans to percolate down from on high. All the news about the company since I've left has validated my decision, and made me realize just how strong the reality distortion field or "Redmond bubble" is.

"What kind of business model is that, shoving ads in peoples' faces?" said one Microsoft intern, who asked not to be named.

Doesn't Microsoft wish it had a big advertising business also?

The whole thing sounds like a ridiculous PR piece. Microsoft is changing the world, I tell you, by trying to get a piece of the pie of someone changing the world.

That's exactly my feeling as well. Looks like MSFT's PR people shadow-wrote this piece.

You've made a strong allegation. Can you explain it, considering this statement at the end of the article?

> (Reporting by Bill Rigby in Seattle; Editing by Jonathan Weber and Richard Chang)

The writer is based in Seattle, and predominately writes on topics related to Washington state, including a healthy dose of Microsoft-related stories (not always rosy).

http://blogs.reuters.com/bill-rigby

No, I cannot prove it, that's why I said that "it looks like" that rather than "I have proof that it is" that.

http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html

Have you read that?

Even if the piece wasn't written by Microsoft's PR, the fact that it's written by someone with a heavily vested interest in the health of the Redmond colossus slants it in such a way that makes it generally worthless for those outside of Seattle.

I'd also like to add:

"What kind of business model is that, extorting companies for using Linux?"

I still get a very ant-competitive and anti-free-culture vibe from the place.

I want to punch whoever said that and also the paragraph above it (where someone claims that the competition is going to die out or whatever).

Makes all the interns look like fools.

The article just boils down to "people interning at Microsoft have a positive impression of their employer." That's hardly a surprise, especially if they're interviewing people now, when they've barely begun their internship.

MSRA intern here. I'm a 31 PhD student with six years of work experience in two startups and a middle-sized software company. Microsoft (Research) is a great place to work simply because there's lots of really, really smart people here.

And for the record, I mainly use Linux on my desktop and nobody cares :)

Microsoft intern here in week three of my 12 week internship. I'll say this: the longer I'm here, the more excited I am about being a part of Microsoft.

Any tips on applying as an intern? Are the online applications a decent route? Sorry; not entire on topic, but I've wanted to intern there for years.

Does Microsoft come to your school's career fair? If so, find out who the recruiter assigned to your school is and e-mail them. Your academic adviser might have this info or you could probably get it from a previous intern from your school. I don't know how the online applications work, I assume I applied online, but after doing a couple dozen applications, it all blended together.

I can't say what the best way to apply is, but if you send me your email (see profile) and optionally a link or description of what you've done/what you are interested in, I'd be happy to pass it on to a recruiter.

Ah, cool. Thanks! I'll keep that in mind, and send you an email sometime. I'd like to work on some small projects, take a few more classes, learn some new things for a while before applying again. No point applying repeatedly without having added anything, heh. Thanks for the reference, though; I'll be sure to annoy you sometime this year with an email.

Recruiters don't come to my university (that I know of), so I applied on their recruiting website (http://careers.microsoft.com/careers/en/us/tech-internships....) and got a position as an SDET. I actually just finished last Friday and have to agree with AdamTReineke, the experience started great and only got better.

Go ahead and apply online. My recruiter told me she actually literally reads every resume that gets submitted (..submitted to her schools, of course). She doesn't use any sort of software filter.

They have a program called Explorers [1] that's been driving a lot of their internship success. It lets interns rotate through different departments, rather than focus on one area.

[1] http://careers.microsoft.com/careers/en/us/internships-explo...

Not just different departments, different professions: 4 weeks in development, 4 weeks in test, 4 weeks in project management.

"Giant Start-up" is an oxymoron.

Giant companies shouldn't pretend to be start-ups or have start-ups cultures.

Why not?

Because you lose the intimacy of start-up culture at scale.

I'm interning at a Big Tech company currently, and I'd disagree. While I can't speak to experiences as a full-time SDE, I very rarely interface with people outside my team (of ~10 people); from what I understand from my mentor, this experience is pretty universal for SDEs, though it diminishes as you take more senior roles in the company.

My work and a given intern's work has literally nothing in common; in fact, talking with other interns feels like talking to people working at a completely different company.

It varies depending on where you go within the company.

In particular, you don't have to go that far up (say, the aiming for SDE3 end of SDE2?) before there are pretty good odds that you'll either be a client of lots of other teams or have lots of clients.

I beg to differ. This is the thing that people misunderstand about Microsoft.

When you work at Microsoft you don't just "work at Microsoft". You work for a TEAM in Microsoft. For example, last year I was an intern on Word. The Word client team consists of maybe ~30 people. You don't feel like you're working with 40k people, but instead a small group of around 30. And you could see how it can become even more granular when you take dev/test/pm disciplines into account.

We have lunch together, we go out after work together, we play board games after work, we do all sorts of fun things together.

It may be fair to say that a giant company should not have a start up culture, though I would find it ludicrous to say that ~teams~ within big companies should not have a start up culture.

* Caveat: Because Microsoft is so big, you'll find that cultures can vary between teams. For example, Bing is rumored to have one of the worst cultures in the company. A culture of excessive work, excessive competition, and overall unpleasant times and people.

Sure, but don't you have to deal with politics and policies from the rest of the company, or occasionally interface with bureaucrats from other departments, other buildings even? Working in a team of 30 people at a big company is never anything like working in a company of 30 people.

Oh, I agree. I don't think working here is like working at a startup (in some good ways and some bad ways). I just thought that it was unfair to say that only startups are allowed to have "intimacy".

I don't necessarily disagree that big companies can't have startup atmospheres, but a small startup usually has a lot more on the line. The relative lack of funding and the pressure to execute well is much more of a reality at a startup than it is at Microsoft.

Because big companies are playing a different game. Their position in the market, the amount of money they have, the kind of problems they have...it's all very different from a start-up. And therefore the culture is different. It might be a great culture to work in, it's just not a startup culture.

Microsoft campus consists of over 120 buildings and tens of thousands of employees. Nobody here thinks they are part of a start up.

And that doesn't include the several large field sites in the U.S. (Charlotte NC, Irving TX, Fargo ND, Silicon Valley, New York, Boston) and elsewhere. I've worked for Microsoft for over a decade, both in the field and on campus, and while some groups are like a "start-up" in the sense that they're brand new, everyone knows they work for a huge company. For most of us, that's why we're here; we get to do really neat things but with the relative security of being at a big employer.

I too had a great time during my internship at Microsoft. I'll never forget the sense of adventure I felt moving across the country to work in a team that made news headlines and impacted millions of people.

Working there full-time I found to be much different. The review system is a competition between peers, and it creates an environment that is at times hostile and at times theatrical. Instead of focusing on technical/product successes people were concerned with "visibility" from their higher ups. Because of this competition for good visibility, office politics dominated the promotion process. People would take credit for other's work and position themselves to dodge accountability for mistakes.

In consequence, many (but not all) of the people who were promoted into management were people I didn't want to work for. The worst manager I had there avoided talking about anything technical and was strictly interested in deadlines and, of course, his own visibility. To indicate his disinterest to his direct reports whenever someone began to discuss an issue in technical detail he would fake a loud and obnoxious yawn. Other managers I interacted with were better, but people like that who would "manage up" seemed to keep getting promoted.

Disclaimer: I work at Google now.

Out of curiosity, what team did you work for and in what years? Did you return full time to the same team you interned in?

I started in 2007 as an intern on a project for Outlook. When I came back I joined a Forefront-related team where I stayed until the beginning of last year.

PR fluff piece. Sure it's great to have money and a nice life style in a beautiful city. MSFT offers this to its employees.

But come on, MSFT is on a long-term downward trajectory. There's nothing that's going to change that until they completely replace their management. As long as their management continue living off incredible past revenues they'll have no incentive to change.

Intern at Microsoft here.

As time goes on, Google and Facebook will eventually be bogged down by the same bureaucracy that exists in any large company. The main difference between Google/Facebook and Microsoft at that point will be what business they are in. If the past and present are any indicator of the future (which I accept might not be the case), then Google and Facebook will be bringing in the vast majority of their revenue through selling ads. Microsoft, on the other hand, will probably still be making their big money selling software. Now I'm sure that a lot will argue that Microsoft makes $x off of android and $y off of linux, but this doesn't really make much of a difference to the engineers. In my opinion, what does make a difference, especially in the minds of "young tech idealists", is that Microsoft sells software, not ads (for the most part).

Microsoft is a great company if you want to spend 5-10 years and build a career at a large corporation. You'll most likely have a very narrowly defined role, but will be paid slightly better in cash. If you want to have bigger impact, and can afford to take lower pay, start a startup or join one.*

A lot of interns Microsoft hires are international students, who, limited by visa rules, cannot afford to take bigger risks.

* Shameless plug: If you are looking for something more exciting than Microsoft, we are hiring. We have built a startup that makes real life logistics more efficient, already helps thousands of people in a concrete way everyday, makes non-trivial revenue, and has raised money from great investors. We also pay better than most startups. Email me: aarjav@gatech.edu

Just curious, have you worked at Microsoft before? (Serious question; I'm not trying to discount your opinion either way)

No, but a lot of my friends went to work for them straight out of school. A couple still do, and they are happy.

I also just hired someone who worked there for 2 years. So I have some perspective from both sides, but not as an insider.

Have you read the amount of comments about Microsoft and loving to be an intern here?

I'm sorry but I have to ask, is this some sort of smart advertising campaign?

As a returning Microsoft intern I will definitely endorse this article. I love this place, I was in Windows last summer and I'm in Windows Phone this summer and it's a very exciting time to be here.

There needs to be a word or term for the phenomenon where someone says, "X is Y!!!" when it's pretty clear that overall and in the general case there are a much larger number of non-X things that are much more Y.

"The US Federal government bureaucracy is an agile, fast-moving cheetah!"

Yes, except all those businesses which are even more agile and faster-moving super-cheetahs. But okay.

If you want to do good, rather than sell ads, why not apply some place like edX (jobs@mitx.mit.edu) or Khan Academy (http://hire.jobvite.com/CompanyJobs/Careers.aspx?k=JobListin...)? Both are actively hiring, and let you do a lot of good for the world. Like a serious lot of good.

I don't think I would ever work at Microsoft, but I feel especially that way because of leadership like Steve Balmer.

Good for them, glad they're happy. I've read and heard too much to ever go there myself, I think. All I can say is, holler at those people in five years and see how they feel then.

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