or not
A few of my (very few) readers have connected me to Microsoft via my posts or my resume and wonder why I don’t dish more dirt like MiniMSFT or Joel On Software. It isn’t that I don’t have the dirt to dish. Believe me, I’ve got plenty. Also, after eight years there, I have some of my own strong opinions on where the company lost its way.
There is one main reason that I don’t talk more about Microsoft: I live in Seattle and I write software for a living. Although I’m not working there now, I can’t ever be sure if I won’t be knocking on the door again someday and the last thing I need is some nasty blog post I wrote about the place to be shown to me during an interview.
I’m really happy that MiniMSFT exists. He (she?) covers a lot of stuff I’d talk about and the comments from current and ex-softies are as informative as the original posts. I don’t get the sense that the author has been at Microsoft that long though. If they had, some of the trends would be a lot more obvious to them.
My hope as a shareholder and (not if I can avoid it) future employee is that Microsoft will wise up in regards to making their employees happy. You can’t expect people to put in 70-80 hour weeks for months at a time when they are making less than industry standard wages and the stock price hasn’t budged in years. A lot of the best people I’ve worked with at Microsoft are gone and many of the rest aren’t sticking around out of loyalty or joy in their work… There is a reason Google, Adobe, and Amazon are having no problems recruiting senior Microsoft engineers away. There are also reasons why the ex-Microsofties (including me) are much happier since they left… but as I said I wasn’t going to dish any dirt right now. 🙂