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by jgfoot
5223 days ago
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Mike Maples talks more about Microsoft back then: (http://conservancy.umn.edu/bitstream/107465/1/oh387mm.pdf ): """I can remember going to the first Microsoft Company picnic in 1988. There were only two children. Microsoft had 1,800 employees and there were only a couple of them that were married. You had all these young kids who weren't married and were right out of school. IBM had conventional dress codes; Microsoft - it was very much like a college campus. The only difference in how they lived, the hours they kept and the way they dressed, between a college campus and Microsoft was that Microsoft bought the equipment. They all wore their shorts and half of them wore sandals or no shoes. Microsoft bought a lot of T-shirts and things for them. There weren't set hours - the management system was to let people pick or sign up for what they were going to do, and it was up to them to do it. So there was very little management attention over directing people or telling them what to do - it was a very empowered work force. And my suspicion was that that was the way IBM was in the 1930s and 1940s. They were much more formal, because the time was much more formal in terms of dress. But in terms of the ages and the attitudes and the mission the people were on - I think it would be a lot the same.""" |
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I especially liked the section where he hi lights Microsoft's hiring practice as one of the main differentiators from its competitors
""" So we had a very intensive interview process. The last interviewer was called the hiring manager, but after every interview, as the candidate left the office, the interviewer sent out an email and wrote the result of the interview. So by the end of the 6th interview, the hiring manager had all reviews but the one where the guy was at that time. The first word on the write-up had to be “hire” or “no-hire”. There wasn't any "maybe" or... "This guy would be good in some other group". It was ... “I would work with this guy” or not. “I think he would work into my group” or not. So the hiring manager then had all of these write-ups and all of these decisions or recommendations. And he would decide whether or not to offer the guy a job. If we offered the guy or gal a job, then the next day would be spent in trying to talk them into realizing how good it was to work at Microsoft; that it's a good place to live and all those things…being nice to them for a change.
Of the 10 we'd bring back, we'd hire one. So we hired about 1 out of every 100 that we initially interviewed. So the total picture is: we've interviewed 10 guys, 8 times each - 80 interviews. We interviewed 100 guys one time, 100 interviews − so we've done about 200 interviews for every person we hired. If you think about hours - that's a lot of hours, and recruiters aren't going to do that. Recruiters aren't going to test coding ability. We had recruiters who managed the logistics and managed the reference checks. We also did aggressive reference checks − we had a whole series of questions we'd ask. Most people doing reference checks are trying to be kind and nice and so people aren't as accurate as you'd like them to be. So you come up with a whole set of questions like: “I know this guy is really good, but what is the one thing you'd counsel him to improve?” Or you'd try to get them to reveal what were some of the deficiencies"""