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by techsupporter 5392 days ago
They don't. Perhaps all devs get more than one machine, but not every employee ("blue badge") gets a 2nd or more system. My sole company-issued computer is a ThinkPad.

Note: I'm in Ops at MSFT.
2 comments
PyErr_SetString 5392 days ago
Yeah, I thought that sounded strange. It would even be slightly embarrassing if all people needed more than one machine to get their job done.
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lurker19 5392 days ago
Microsoft develops operating systems.
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PyErr_SetString 5392 days ago
I am aware of that :) When developing OS it might make sense to have two machines. (unless you can run in a VM, which I think many could)

But, not everyone at MS works with windows, which is why I was a little surprised about the statement that everyone had more than one machine.

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awa 5391 days ago
Afaik 2 machines are almost mandatory 1. Dev machine 2. Email machine

The 2 biggest orgs inside MS are Office and Windows, devs in both of them can't have a single machine doing both the above tasks. (And VMs suck for disk based I/O, and that becomes a factor when you have multi-hour build time)

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mellifluousmind 5392 days ago
Yes, economy does impact internally at Microsoft. Thankfully, we have Hyper-V to have more than one OS in a given box. But back in the old days, two machines per person was pretty standard. I no longer work for MSFT, so not all orgs still stick to the same policy
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mellifluousmind 5392 days ago
That's really odd. I used to work under Windows Live org, and all the Ops we know have more than one machine (at minimum, a laptop and a desktop). Even the orange badge has more than one machine...

Honestly, the only blue badge that doesn't really need more than one machine is PM. Both SDE and SDET definitely need more than one to develop and test. Ops can manage a cloud with just one, but in theory, we all know that Ops has access to a ton of VMs, so I consider them as more than one machine.

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