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Comment by alpb | Hacker News Reader

Hey there, author of the post here. I thought I may justify what I said.

I have friends in almost all big companies and I discuss them about these issues a lot. Almost all of them agree that they are in a similar situation.

I know that even Microsoft is a huge world and NOT all organizations are the same. All organizations have their own culture so there's no common culture in the company I can describe. In a way this is good.

So the statement "Even if all teams at MS suck" would be really wrong. In addition to this, organizations get better and develop culture over time. Thanks for the comment.

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I am at the same point in my career as you. My first job out of college was at HP. I must say that everything you mentioned was the case for me too.

Now I'm at a smaller company, and my quality of life has improved tremendously.

Ex IBMer here. Spent some time there when I was OPs age and my experience was similar. I'm at a mid-size company and it's better but still not perfect! Nothing is, at least all the time, I assume.

> I have friends in almost all big companies and I discuss them about these issues a lot. Almost all of them agree that they are in a similar situation.

Really? You have friends in almost all big companies?

There's a lot of truth in the points you mention, but even in my limited experience (six years at two companies, one very large and one pretty small), it's much more complex than you suggest. Many of these things were flat out not the case at both companies (e.g., the points about "the world outside"), some of them were absolutely true of both (2-3 hours of coding per day is common), and some were worse at the small company (e.g., documentation).

I'm with the parent: these issues have little to do with company size, but they do reflect the quality of an organization. In both environments I've worked in, to the extent that these issues were present, they were considered problems to be fixed, not something to be resigned about.

I pretty sure he meant most of his friends work at big companies.

Also there aren't that many tech companies as big as Microsoft, in terms of either market cap or number of employees. Seems pretty easy to have friends at all of them if you were friends with a lot of people in a CS department at college.

Yeah, that's a more plausible reading. Thanks.

But that undermines the original point about big companies even more. Having friends at mostly big companies is not only not enough to generalize about big companies, but it provides no information about whether other companies struggle with these issues too.

Some teams at Microsoft do have internal documentation. We decided about 10 years ago, before our product got away from us, to start documenting the architecture. This is something that our management completely supported (they may have even suggested it), and we added this effort to our schedule, not as a "slack time" thing. Turns out that forcing yourself to document the architecture also helps keep the architecture sane because it really hurts to document something ugly.

We also have a ton of specs, archived off over the last 15 years. Those can sometimes be quite useful.

Good luck. I don't really envy you for the next 1:1 you'll have with your manager.

Good point. Utterly unprofessional of him to post something so specific for a company instead of discussing it privately. Even then, he should probably work on providing some suggestions instead of engaging in the blame game alone.

I was reading this post as if he was not working for M$ anymore. Also, he might be safeguarding a future for him in small startup with the same attitude... if he is fine limiting his options so much, good luck.

> I have friends in almost all big companies and I discuss them about these issues a lot. Almost all of them agree that they are in a similar situation.

As you get older, you'll find there's a stark difference between first & second-hand experience.

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