[Animus7]

My story is similar. I was looking to get a tech job out of college a couple of years back, and Microsoft picked me up first (Google was also interested with talks of similar offers but they moved much slower).

It was all interesting and new for the first few months. The team was going through chaotic transitions at the time, so I was shuffled around many challenging projects, all with tight deadlines and technical brokenness up the yin-yang. Luckily for them, this kind of environment was my forte.

Being the workaholic hacker I've always been, I spent day and night slaving away trying to fix everything. Processes, tools, bugs. I broke the daily build a couple of times but surprisingly, nobody gave me heck about it; I was earning a reputation as the new guy who got shit done. In retrospect, I was probably deliberately thrown into the projects that seemed hopeless and bug-ridden because I actually cared about this stuff.

And I realized I was the only one who cared.

The day I received my "Gold Star" (which was actually far more than the $1K the author got), I remember walking by a sign someone had posted that said "Change the world or go home". And then it hit me -- nobody here believed this except me. Everything was a business case analysis. Shit remained broken and bug-ridden because some key stakeholder needed it to work that way on their even more broken systems. Meetings about when to schedule the next meetings. Blame being thrown around abstract "teams", so no actual person had to be accountable when the shit hit the fan. It was all so pointless. Sure, it made money, and I was taking a happy slice. But I didn't care about money. I cared about changing the world.

I deliberated for a day or two, then sent in my resignation.

What followed was several weeks of escalation and meetings with higher-up execs trying to convince me to stay with the company, explaining their idea of where the division was headed. The problem was that everyone literally had a different idea of what that was. It just did more to convince me that this was sinking ship, and they saw me as a plug.

Needless to say, I broke free, and I don't touch Microsoft products anymore. I saw the brokenness from the inside, and I have no faith in the byproducts of their "processes" and managerial wankery.

I'm doing the startup thing now, which in retrospect I should have been doing in the first place. And I couldn't be happier.

[mattmanser]

I was chatting with a friend of mine on Thursday that MS seem to have a 'get shit done' team that magically pops up every now and again.

Like the EF migrations project was looking really, really awful[1] and someone's managed to turn it around and it's ended up lookig like it might be great[2].

Or like when Rails/Django were the talk out of the town and a new MVC PHP framework came out every day and ASP.Net was looking marginalised and extremely dated with every passing day. Then all of a sudden from almost nowhere comes a really great MVC framework.

Or when C# 3.5/F# came out.

There's good teams in there, it's just hard to find them I think.

[1]http://www.hanselman.com/blog/EntityFrameworkCodeFirstMigrat... [2]http://www.davidhayden.me/blog/asp.net-mvc-4-and-entity-fram...

[latch]

You are talking about small projects, which, in the scale of things, are insignificant. They are all DevDiv projects, and even within DevDiv, they are fairly small. It's a company of 92000 employees, with some of their projects worth billions quarterly. Your perspective, from your examples, is completely skewed.

[mattmanser]

Other examples include Windows Phone and XBox both of which seemingly came from nowhere in a 'just get it done' style.

There's some real love and skill that's been put into the XBox for example, just browse around it some time.

My perspective is coloured by the developer stuff as that's what I'm most interested in.

[latch]

Windows Phone came out 3+ years (almost 4) after the iPhone. It was the most obvious and slowest product launch in recent memory. It also hasn't been a great success. If Windows Phone is proof that Microsoft is doing well....It also wasn't some spontaneous/organic product that just sprung up. It was a massive coordinated company-wide event that took years to "pull off".

As for the Xbox, it's a huge loss leaders. The division is billions in the red. XBox 360 (which had a 33% failure rate) started to make a bit of money last year (or maybe the year before that)..but it's a fraction of what they've put into it. In the long term, the strategy of owning the living room might work out, but so far, no, it neither "came out of nowhere" nor is it a succes. The problem with consoles is that, you are only as good as your current generation. Also, no one has managed to crack the living room yet, and they've all tried. History tells us it's a waste of money.

[Goronmon]

As for the Xbox, it's a huge loss leaders. The division is billions in the red. XBox 360 (which had a 33% failure rate) started to make a bit of money last year (or maybe the year before that)..but it's a fraction of what they've put into it.

From what I've gathered, the entertainment division has been making a profit since 2008. It's tough to get solid numbers on the contribution of the 360 to that, since the division contained things like the Zune for a while. I would be surprised if they don't end up profiting overall on the 360.

Sure, that might not make up for the losses on the original Xbox, but that generation was always about gaining a foothold, not making a profit. MS didn't have a horse in race until a year after the release of the PS2. To go from that to the market share that the 360 commands right now is impressive.

Eve that said I don't think making money on console sales was ever the main reason MS got into the market in the first place. I think they realized that gaming consoles were going to become an important part of household entertainment, even outside of gaming itself. Consoles are becoming one-stop shops for all forms of enterainment nowadays. I use my systems to watch disc-based media, streaming off other devices in my house, Netflix, etc. MS would be in a really tough spot if they had let Sony snatch up this market without putting up a fight.

[quadhome]

Windows Phone definitely didn't come out of nowhere. A good friend of mine was one of the PM leads there. We used to have conversations on the bus every evening— him sweating decisions, fighting for inches, and showing off slow weekly progress on his debug unit.

Windows Phone was a lot of hard yards by some talented people working too late for too little. I long since left, but I expect it was the typical herculean project where 80% of the team left after it was out the door.

[wrt54g]

I'm starting at Microsoft out of college in July and this worries me. Could I ask which product you were on?

[iuoter]

I wouldn't worry about it if I were you. Anyone who thinks his experiences on one team in a 100,000 person company (or even a 10,000 person company!) are in any way broadly representative is full of shit. Microsoft has some dysfunctional teams, as does anyone, but it has plenty of good ones, too. I worked there for quite a few years after college and it was a great learning experience. I had friends in other teams who had both good and bad experiences. It just depends.

OP was an "account manager," which means that anything he tells you has absolutely no relevance to the engineering side of things.