[VRay]

To be fair, some morons at Microsoft do it too

My skip-level manager put me on a performance improvement plan there because he said someone else had done 10x as much work as me. It turned out that the other engineer had closed out something like 1 "bug" ticket per day, and I'd closed out 1 "task" ticket per day PLUS some bugs, so I'd done substantially more work.

I just waited until my next stock vesting, then took a severance package and left that rancid shithole. We were working on some retarded dead-end boondoggle of a device, and I'm sure everyone in the org got a frowny face on their report card when it was eventually canceled.

Ironically, I actually had a pretty decent experience at Amazon before that. I guess it just goes to show that the most important thing about any job is your manager and your team.

[kapp_in_life]

>retarded dead-end boondoggle of a device

It was the amazon dash button wasn't it.

[VRay]

haha, this was at Microsoft, and the dash button was a glowing success compared to the project I'm talking about

I'd better not dump any more details though, since it's technically still under NDA..

What I'd really like would be a good set of questions to ask as the job interviewee to help me filter out bad teams/orgs. I guess the ability to do that could be considered part of the skillset of a good VP of engineering, though, so maybe it's unreasonable to expect us grunts to pull it off..

[YZF]

Just ask why they like working there. Ask for specifics. Ask for things they don't like. Ask for specifics.

Best idea is not to go somewhere without having friends on the inside who you trust and can tell you what it's like.

[dhbanes]

was it a talking staple?

[sokoloff]

It sounded like that story was at Microsoft to me, but now that I know you thought it was Amazon, I can see that it’s ambiguous and could be read either way.

[kapp_in_life]

Ah you're probably right that it was at Microsoft. My brain must have forgotten the first line by the end of reading the comment, among all the other Amazon specific stories in this thread.

[Lt_Riza_Hawkeye]

It has to be the microsoft mood bra, right?

[subsaharancoder]

>retarded dead-end boondoggle of a device

Zune music player?

[sgerenser]

Zune was actually pretty popular and had its fans for its time, despite getting completely outsold and outshone by the iPod. I think it didn’t get cancelled until smartphones were clearly starting to replace dedicated music players.

If I had to guess it would be the Kin devices that evolved from the purchase of Danger, those things clearly fit the OP’s description: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Kin