Definitely do not join Microsoft and definitely do not join any windows related teams. Microsoft is hell. Every team is fully siloed. Culture wise it’s a wasteland and teams as a communication platform is awful
Sitting on the Microsoft campus at the moment... not a kernel developer. <looks around> yeah, this is not hell. Not even a bit.
Microsoft is great. It's an amazing place to make impacts in many different areas of technology. Work teams used to be more siloed, but that's changed a lot in the last 6-7 years. We regularly work across teams at GitHub and Microsoft to get things done with great cooperation.
As for Teams vs. Slack vs. Discord, it's a personal taste thing. I'd rather have Teams over Slack + Zoom 1000x.
Take the Windows kernel job! Worst case, it's not a fit and you move on, like any other job. Best case, you stick around for a long time and have a great career working on tech that 1B+ people use.
When Robert Downey Jr. was trying to talk Gwyneth Paltrow into joining "Iron Man", he said to her something like, "do you want to work on art house films the rest of your life or do you want to be in something that people actually see?"
Windows is massive... it's the largest code base that I'm aware of. It has a ton of process and procedures and test cycles because... it's Windows. Of course you can't just freelance there. But you can "be in something that people actually see", and most SV startups will never even get 1,000 users, much less 1,000,000,000+, and more if you count the users on Azure services using Windows indirectly.
> When Robert Downey Jr. was trying to talk Gwyneth Paltrow into joining "Iron Man", he said to her something like, "do you want to work on art house films the rest of your life or do you want to be in something that people actually see?"
Sounds like a bastardization of Jobs on convicing John Sculley manufactured by a PR person:
Steve Jobs and John Sculley, then PepsiCo president, were sitting on a balcony overlooking New York’s Central Park. Jobs turned to Sculley and said, “Do you want to sell sugar water for the rest of your life or come with me and change the world?”
That's like asking someone who cooks at a fine-dining restaurant to work at McDonalds, "do you want to make pretentious food for 40 cashed up foodies and critics a day, or do you want to make food for hundreds of regular people a day?"
People pretending that Facebook, Google, Microsoft, et al are noble endevours are deranged. It's like rooting for Walmart to win the World Series of Retail.
McDonalds corporate actually employs chefs to develop new menu items, and a large part of the process is figuring out how to work within the constraints of being able to consistently reproduce a menu item at thousands of locations, sourcing the necessary ingredients via the McD supply chain. I'm sure it's an interesting problem and a chef working at a fine-dining restaurant may very well find it a nice change of pace compared to feeding a small number of rich, pretentious jerks.
Say what you will, but McDonalds is pretty remarkable in their consistency, even internationally. A big mac in New York is the same a Big Mac in San Francisco, as in the Midwest, as in Germany.
A pet peeve of mine is pizza joints who serve a different pie every time, depending on who's in the kitchen. If I have a great pizza, I expect to get it again, but rarely do. Consistency is hard.
Sure. I've worked at Microsoft primarily, and I'm not speaking for all teams but I have a sibling on another team in another org and he has the same issues
Microsoft is incredibly siloed. Each team is essentially their own mini company and they're mainly guided by large top line metrics but there's no top down overall vision on what something should look like. It's like those party games where everyone has to draw a portion of a drawing. It comes out looking like a disaster even if every individual portion is good. This also means that product management doesn't work with any particular team either. You essentially get some random big metric and are told "make this metric better" without any context. Everyone is duplicating work and there's nowhere to learn from
Microsoft Teams is a disaster in so many ways. In the most obvious way, it's very very slow and a pain to use. This subtly hinders teamwork because no one wants to use teams. In other ways, there's no global search so finding stuff in other orgs is impossible. The teams "channels" are essentially shitty forums that are unintuitive to use. You'll never get a channel about hobbies and stuff and even if you did it's hard to find and they're usually dead. Everyone uses private group chats including each team but these have zero discoverability. What this means is you'll never have a golang channel or something where people share and chat about stuff. Most people have a facebook group where they chat about stuff (wild).
Every team has their own onboarding down to what hardware you should get. In theory this allows for some flexibility but what this actually means is that no one has any idea how you should be onboarded and you essentially are sent to flounder until you pick stuff up.
Everyone is doing everything. Every person is their own product manager, scrum master, manager, and also programmer. There's so much duplicated process overhead it's wild.
They have not handled remote well. They insisted on trying to send me a desktop computer. I asked for a laptop and they couldn't give it to me and they instead sent me a used intern laptop. They gave my sibling a used surface tablet. This is a 2 trillion dollar company and they're unwilling to shell out 2k for a basic workstation computer with 6-8 cores and 32gb of ram. Not a huge ask. Also some stuff is only accessible through a direct hardline in the office. Whether you want to use a desktop or not is irrelevant. It's mainly how cheap they are when it comes to hardware.
EVERYTHING has to be Microsoft software for the most part. If you think nih syndrome is bad at your company, imagine you're at a company where they've been making mostly mediocre versions of other software for the past 30 years. Yeah. I'm not a huge splunk fan but trust me when I say the azure equivalent is much shittier.
The pay isn't top notch. In fact it's pretty bottom barrel for a big company and if you can pass the microsoft interviews you can pass somewhere else. Their interview process is also a nightmare. I went through 4 different recruiters and it took me 2 months between passing to get an offer letter. The whole thing was insane. They initially offered me such a paltry amount it made me laugh.
Everyone is a lifer because anyone else has left. Imagine talking to your boss about docker or talking to him about IntelliJ and he's never heard of it because he's been at Microsoft for 20 years.
There's a lot of weird "not racism" but might as well be where certain ethnic groups have taken over certain orgs and speak in their primarily mother tongue despite being in the US in a US based company. It makes teammwork really hard.
You need a separate laptop to log into any production resource. Production resource is a loose term because that also includes int environments and anything on azure. I have 2 laptops and a desktop that I'm forced to remote into it's insane and so slow.
There is no one to talk to about anything. You literally cannot find what anyone is working on or what's happening. Discoverability at this company is literally 0
HR processes are like actually completely broken down to me not receiving healthcare for 3 weeks after I joined forcing me to pay some very big expenses out of pocket that would have been 0 after the fact. Getting reimbursed doesn't work because after the fact those expenses only applied to my deductible which wouldn't have been the case if I paid initially with my healthcare.
Most things are a huge heaping pile of legacy crap that absolutely cannot be changed for backwards compatibility. Imagine working on a c++ code base with no local environment, no unit tests, and the only way it can be changed is to make a change and upload it to a build server (1hr + build times) and then deploy it. Yeah. There's no room to improve things because it's all so delicate.
There's simply so much. Thankfully I'm leaving but it's been ass
