[savoy11]

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.

[axod]

The microsoft bashing here is pretty minimal. Hackers in general do not like microsoft because it makes sub par lousy buggy ill thought out products, operates morally questionable business practices, and is fairly incompetent with new products.

Microsoft got lucky, once, by being in the right place at the right time (And having the right connections).

I'm not saying I agree with the OP or not, but any microsoft bashing that goes on is more than warranted. They have crushed businesses, held back innovation, wasted millions of hours of peoples lives trying to make IE not completely suck, etc

They do not innovate to improve users experience, they act to defend their monopoly. Look at the mozilla vs IE story. Once IE was dominant, they shelved development of it for years - it had served its purpose, which was to crush mozilla and hold back innovation of the web as a platform.

[rbanffy]

> Microsoft got lucky, once

To be fair, they got lucky a good many times. They wrote a BASIC interpreter (MITS even paid them to work on that) for the nascent personal computer industry that was mostly there when needed.

Microsoft's BASIC was the first language many of us learned to program in. The other day I solved Google's "are you a programmer" tests using both an Apple //e and a TRS-80 Model III (emulated with MESS). It was nostalgic.

[kenjackson]

I think it might be fair to say that MS has gotten "lucky" more times than probably any other tech company, including Apple. Maybe only IBM has gotten "lucky" more often, but they also have a much longer history.

[rbanffy]

Microsoft didn't have to count entirely on luck - the were also aided by some really incompetent competitors...

I remember shopping for a new desktop PC right after OS/2 2.0 was launched. IBM charged more for a PC with their own OS (even though it included Windows) than for one with Windows alone, the sheer boneheadedness of that baffled me so completely the person on the other side of the phone taking my order thought I hung up. In the end, I forked out the extra US$ 50 or so and got the OS/2 box. The OS was really nice, very advanced for the time.

At that time, running a Unix GUI on a PC was a ludicrous proposition.

[Locke1689]

[citation needed]

Seriously though, some of the biggest operating systems (my research area, OS virtualization in specific) advances have come out of Microsoft Research and Windows kernel development.

[rbanffy]

> some of the biggest operating systems (...) have come out of Microsoft Research and Windows kernel development

Care to list them?

[Locke1689]

I can list some. The Xen paper was done between Cambridge and MSR Cambridge.

http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=502034.502053&coll...

http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=233269.233330&coll...

http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=945445.945474&coll...

http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/dryad/ is fucking cool if you're familiar with MapReduce.

There are a handful of IPDPS papers I also know of but can't grab because I'm off campus and my VPN to Northwestern is acting wonky.

[rbanffy]

Thank you. Those are very interesting reads. It's been a long time since I played with really cutting-edge OS concepts and virtualization has never been my main interest (I was into hardware during college).

[savoy11]

This is a ridiculous post and can be upvoted only here.

[electromagnetic]

I'd hire a developer from Microsoft for sure. Solely for the reason that they have an inside knowledge with Microsoft products that your average developer might not, furthermore they might have enough connections that you can get insider-info on what might be involved in the next MS OS before everyone else gets the info.

[johns]

I think you overestimate the knowledge an MS dev has outside of their team. Talk to any of them and you'll quickly find out how little they know outside their area. It's a very big company with a lot of silos.

[Locke1689]

Most "inside information" is spread by watercooler talk anyway -- which is a lot less common when products are separated by building.

The number one source for insider Microsoft information is Microsoft interns. Why? We're in almost every product division in Microsoft and we have our own inter-departmental social groups. I heard of some serious insider information not just on MS, but on Intel, Nvidia, etc. just from hanging out and drinking with the other interns on weekends.

[alain94040]

Advice: don't write that kind of comment publicly, you may regret it many years later.

[Locke1689]

I'm not revealing any of the information, just that word of mouth did spread it. I'm still under NDA.

[jdp23]

Many of the same concerns apply to hiring developers from Microsoft. If it's just one stop on a varied career, or if it's combined with some open source activities, then I'm not too concerned; if it's their only full-time job or they've been there for a long time, then my initial reaction is concerned about what kinds of habits and mindsets they've fallen into.