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.
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.