>This is a person at his first job out of college and he's been there for less than a year. And yet he has the audacity to say "I learned that one will see this sort of problems in all large scale companies."? Really? This is absurd.

Can you just learn from his experience that he describes, and get over an inconsequential phrase at a tiny part of the post?

Even if it's not applicable "everywhere", it's a nice description of what he found in his parts of Microsoft.

Not to mention that as a senior engineer that's seen several companies (and had done contract work for others), it's pretty much spot on in general.

>Even with my experience, I don't think I've seen much more than a thin slice of the variance in practices that is out there.

Which is besides the point. What he describes it pretty normal stuff, going on all around:

1) companies not having much internal documentation for lots of their stuff,

2) not everyone being overly enthusiastic for coding,

3) code fixes that doesn't have business value are not very welcome,

4) people can mostly squeeze 3-4 hours of good coding a day, etc.

That's not some obscure practices, or some arcane rituals that only happen on a small slice of companies. Those are pretty much the norm all around.

Some companies might do better or worse in some aspects, but it's not like there are some alien practices or some novel ways to deal with software that are out there in companies and you have to explore very hard to find them... Even if they were, they would be so little spread that it won't matter.

>I can't wrap my head around the sort of arrogance and myopia that makes a 21 or 22 yr old think that he can describe an entire world from such limited experience.

Are you fucking kidding me? That's what 21 year olds do. Make strong statements and have strong opinions on their limited experience.

It's the myopia of not knowing this very basic fact, that I cannot wrap my head around.

> Can you just learn from his experience that he describes, and get over an inconsequential phrase at a tiny part of the post?

Actually, no. The post wasn't phrased as "here was my experience", and rightly so: there are lots of terrible engineering organizations, and many readers wouldn't hugely care about yet another such horror story. Rather, the post reads as advice that new grads learn early to be resigned to what they might otherwise perceive to be dysfunctional engineering. I think there's too much of that already, and it's frustrating to see a post advocating that.

> Are you fucking kidding me? That's what 21 year olds do.

Not all, i have the pleasure of working with some 20-22 year olds who would be very unlikely to make such a statement.

Sure, not all.

That goes without saying as the intended meaning for every* use of "everybody", "nobody", "every", "all" etc in normal conversation. Those are statistical qualifiers, not absolutes.

(*well, almost every -- which reinforces my point).

Thats why i personally try to not used absolutes conversation, because some people do think like that where of every X is Y.

As long as you don't remind anyone that uses it implicitly that he is wrong, feel free to use it as you wish.

Is thinking these problems are likely common across all gigantic companies really so egregious?

Hey there, author of the post here. I thought I may justify what I said.

I have friends in almost all big companies and I discuss them about these issues a lot. Almost all of them agree that they are in a similar situation.

I know that even Microsoft is a huge world and NOT all organizations are the same. All organizations have their own culture so there's no common culture in the company I can describe. In a way this is good.

So the statement "Even if all teams at MS suck" would be really wrong. In addition to this, organizations get better and develop culture over time. Thanks for the comment.

I am at the same point in my career as you. My first job out of college was at HP. I must say that everything you mentioned was the case for me too.

Now I'm at a smaller company, and my quality of life has improved tremendously.

Ex IBMer here. Spent some time there when I was OPs age and my experience was similar. I'm at a mid-size company and it's better but still not perfect! Nothing is, at least all the time, I assume.

> I have friends in almost all big companies and I discuss them about these issues a lot. Almost all of them agree that they are in a similar situation.

Really? You have friends in almost all big companies?

There's a lot of truth in the points you mention, but even in my limited experience (six years at two companies, one very large and one pretty small), it's much more complex than you suggest. Many of these things were flat out not the case at both companies (e.g., the points about "the world outside"), some of them were absolutely true of both (2-3 hours of coding per day is common), and some were worse at the small company (e.g., documentation).

I'm with the parent: these issues have little to do with company size, but they do reflect the quality of an organization. In both environments I've worked in, to the extent that these issues were present, they were considered problems to be fixed, not something to be resigned about.

I pretty sure he meant most of his friends work at big companies.

Also there aren't that many tech companies as big as Microsoft, in terms of either market cap or number of employees. Seems pretty easy to have friends at all of them if you were friends with a lot of people in a CS department at college.

Yeah, that's a more plausible reading. Thanks.

But that undermines the original point about big companies even more. Having friends at mostly big companies is not only not enough to generalize about big companies, but it provides no information about whether other companies struggle with these issues too.

Some teams at Microsoft do have internal documentation. We decided about 10 years ago, before our product got away from us, to start documenting the architecture. This is something that our management completely supported (they may have even suggested it), and we added this effort to our schedule, not as a "slack time" thing. Turns out that forcing yourself to document the architecture also helps keep the architecture sane because it really hurts to document something ugly.

We also have a ton of specs, archived off over the last 15 years. Those can sometimes be quite useful.

Good luck. I don't really envy you for the next 1:1 you'll have with your manager.

Good point. Utterly unprofessional of him to post something so specific for a company instead of discussing it privately. Even then, he should probably work on providing some suggestions instead of engaging in the blame game alone.

I was reading this post as if he was not working for M$ anymore. Also, he might be safeguarding a future for him in small startup with the same attitude... if he is fine limiting his options so much, good luck.

> I have friends in almost all big companies and I discuss them about these issues a lot. Almost all of them agree that they are in a similar situation.

As you get older, you'll find there's a stark difference between first & second-hand experience.

The thing is, he's (mostly) right. I've consulted/worked for over a dozen of the F100 and have run across varying degrees of everything described (some better, some worse) over 10 years.

This isnt to say you can't make change. You just have to play work as a very strategic game of chess and, often, take risks most others won't/don't. I've done it and that is one of the only reasons I still play the game. I'm genuinely interested in making things better and pushing out the cruft.

The downside is that it wears on you. I generally get burnt out or bored after a couple years and look for something new to reset and challenge myself on. And as bad as this reads for Microsoft (really - were you surprised?) I don't think there's any other factual data to support Azure being a market leading product and these sort of indicators only solidify that position (garbage in/garbage out).

These types of perspectives are good for those who are considering the reality of working for these size organizations. Not because it's a guarantee that things will surely mirror what's been outlined, however it lends candidates a tool to ask questions which would be indicators of the reality of the work environment.

Kudos to the author.

"I learned that one will see this sort of problems in all large scale companies. "

The way that reads in the paragraph makes it seem as though it was thrown in as an afterthought and that it applies as a separate statement on its own - unrelated from the 8 months. It's the only line that says anything about other companies. Maybe someone read his post, and said "hey, you know it's like that everywhere right?" Or, "Hey you know higher ups might not like you hating on us like that." And so he throws in a sentence to solidify the fact that he's not trying to single out Microsoft.

He probably got fed that idea day in and day out while there.

I have worked for a few different large organizations and have often faced the size excuse for being unorganized and ineffective. I personally feel it is a cop out, and self fulfilling prophesy once it becomes an accepted perspective, because then people stop trying to be better.

I have also worked in big organizations on kick-ass teams who are willing to fight uphill battles against "we are too big to change" attitude. Thats what made them awesome teams.

>This is a person at his first job out of college and he's been there for less than a year. And yet he has the audacity to say "I learned that one will see this sort of problems in all large scale companies."? Really? This is absurd.

Fwiw, I read it as a way of (plausibly) covering his ass if he was ever hauled in front of management about the post, not a way of overstating his experience. YMMV.

It's not absurd. Perhaps he shared his experiences at Microsoft with friends and relatives who work at other large companies and they told him they had the same experience?

I read it as "An Ironic, Passive-Aggressive Retrospective on Microsoft's Wonderful Practices".

> I can't wrap my head around the sort of arrogance and myopia that makes a 21 or 22 yr old think that he can describe an entire world from such limited experience.

I like him already, If were Microsoft I _will_ hire him asap. He's the type of person who wants to make things better.

Wanting to make things better really isn't enough. You need to be able to make it happen. Writing a blog post to the world from your limited experience that a particular company has problems is cute and probably feels good, but not really helpful to fixing the problem. If he actually explained what he would do to make things better, that would be a start.

Yeh, he is still young enough to change the world.

Not knowing anything about large team programming (I'm doing a biology startup) I took it to mean "you well see at least one of these problems at any given large scale company [fill in the rest]."

I was at Microsoft for 5 years, in a completely different group from the OP. My experience matched his exactly, in character and specifics.

one of the things i liked about Microsoft is that you can move teams (pretty) easily. i myself have had different experiences/practices in both the teams i was a part of.

I didn't think having to maneuver around passive aggression and outright blocking by current management, or having to pass full interview loops for each new position, were particularly fluid. Perhaps in a culture of hyper-competitiveness, some find those circumstances exciting. I found them good reasons to leave the company.