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Some Developers Leaving Google For Microsoft
Posted by
kdawson
on Mon Jun 30, 2008 05:45 PM
from the turning-tide-or-momentary-reversal dept.
from the turning-tide-or-momentary-reversal dept.
recoiledsnake writes "We have heard about lots of talented developers jumping ship from Microsoft to Google, but is the trend beginning to turn? Dare Obasanjo (a Microsoft employee) writes about a few high-profile people picking Microsoft over Google — either making the jump directly, or choosing Microsoft after receiving offers at both. Sergey Solyanik is back to Microsoft and he primarily gripes about the culture and lack of career development at Google. He writes, 'Everything is pretty much run by [engineering] — PMs and testers are conspicuously absent from the process. Google as an organization is not geared — culturally — to delivering enterprise class reliability to its user applications.' Danny Thorpe, who was the key architect of Google Gears, is back at Microsoft for his second stint working on developer technologies related to Windows Live."
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Is that so? (Score:5, Insightful)
"Everything is pretty much run by [engineering] -- PMs and testers are conspicuously absent from the process."
Oh what a fucking nightmare!
Re:Is that so? (Score:5, Funny)
Yeah! They should be run by marketing and management people, just like at Microsoft! Everyone knows that engineers can't be relied upon to produce enterprise quality software without marketing's careful guidance and input.
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Re:Is that so? (Score:5, Funny)
Wow. Where is this alleged paradise where Program Managers STFU and pay attention to the coders? Where testers don't get to touch it until it's ready for testing?
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Re:Is that so? (Score:5, Insightful)
Look at Microsoft on the other hand, they're extremely nested in processes and cannot get out.
As for the article, I'd say there's so much more to look at. Housing, as already mentioned, is only part of the picture. What about salaries and work environments (some people do like process more than working anarchy)? I for one understand the argument of being a god among insects.
No knowledge or real research done here, just thinking "outside the box". I hear Microsoft likes that.
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Re:Is that so? (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem really is when either function gets too much control. Marketing tends to get capricious about features and blows huge sums on "research" and end up with a Ford Fiero.
Engineering, well... I've seen low-level greatness that couldn't translate elegantly into customer-level value. I've seen projects never finish too.
The problem is probably management-level. *Someone* needs to crack a few heads together to get people back into reality. A good anecdote about the organizational problem was on /. a couple of days ago when the mighty Bill Gates was supposedly pissed about some feature/application/thing. He cracked heads near his level. One level below it turned into a managerial quagmire.
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Re:Is that so? (Score:5, Insightful)
I so want to work there. I've seen both sides of this, run by engineering is 100000x better, if you're an engineer.
I agree if you're trying to get to management and NOT the alpha geek in the pack, then you are dicked. But then why are you in engineering at all? The hours are long, the people are socially clueless, failure to know some obscure piece of academia turd may brand you the retard of the group...why put up with that? You are GUARANTEED to get in to management (in the private sector) if you are even slightly responsible and care even a little bit about the company...outside of engineering. Inside engineering, you need to be in a Microsoft (or the N equivalents) that will dumb down engineering to level the playing field. A few companies can do that, but not many that are on track.
All this is peaceful bliss compared to being an engineer in an a business-oriented company. It's illogical, insane, dubiously profitable, hard in all the wrong ways...but yeah I could climb ye ole ladder and make mom happy. Somehow culturally incompetant middle management >> clueful engineer in the bragometer. Eh, I'll trade them my senseless business-driven engineering job for their engineering-driven engineering job.
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Dare Obasanjo may only be promoting himself. (Score:5, Insightful)
To me, the story lacks sufficient deep analysis to be sure we understand Mr. Solyanik's experiences.
I doubt that very many people are moving from "Do no evil" to "Doing a lot of evil is the only way we know to make a living".
What is Windows Vista but a rather unimportant update to Windows XP, that failed? Microsoft Word has new menus, but changing the menus also means that Microsoft now has two menu arrangement standards in use at the same time, and users must master them both. Internet Explorer version 7 has a third menu arrangement, further breaking the standard with which those who just want to use their computers are so familiar. TrueCrypt developers are talking about [truecrypt.org] suing Microsoft in European court because of anti-trust violations.
Is that the direction successful people want to go?
To understand this story, it's good to know more about Dare Obasanjo, in my opinion. He's intelligent, he's a good communicator, and he has a history of being very effective at promoting himself. To me, his story is just him being himself, and promoting himself to Microsoft. Maybe it is not very indicative of what is happening at Microsoft.
Dare Obasanjo's excerpts of Sergey Solyanik's blog start with, "Last week I left Google to go back to Microsoft".
In contrast, Sergey Solyanik says "There are many things that Google does really well, and I plan to advocate that some of these things be adopted at Microsoft."
Mr. Solyanik went back to Microsoft because he didn't like the openness and lack of structure at Google. He wants more structure. He doesn't want to be a manager, and he doesn't want to decide himself the direction of what he is doing.
Dare Obasanjo's excerpts are misleading, in my opinion. As I said, he seems to me to be promoting himself to Microsoft, rather than understanding anything about why a particular person would quit Google after only a year there and go back to Microsoft. Also, Mr. Solyanik may have been given a very sweet deal; that is not discussed.
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More about "Do no evil" toward "Evil for profit!" (Score:5, Interesting)
Quote:
"It's sobering to realize that during Ballmer's term as CEO, MSFT has underperformed almost all of its top tech peers (including AAPL, IBM, HPQ, SAP, INTC, CSCO, SYMC, NOK, ORCL, ADBE, RIMM, QCOM, Ebay, and AMZN), and badly lagged the major averages. We may even see our third plunge to test the 2000 lows during his watch. Unbelievable. There may be another major technology CEO with an equivalent or worse track record who is still in power, but a name doesn't come readily to mind."
In my opinion, Microsoft depends for much of its profit on adversarial behavior.
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Re:Is that so? (Score:5, Informative)
Labels aren't better than folders?
Labels can functionally completely replace folders, and surpass them.
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Re:Is that so? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Is that so? (Score:5, Informative)
Let me restate myself.
They can seamlessly, easily and completely replace folders. You used to put items in folders. Put labels on them and archive. It is the same thing, but even better, now one mail can have multiple labels which solves the dilemma of where to file it.
There are also extensions I've seen to have sub-labels that operate the way sub-folders do if you really want an old school nest. Technically you don't need extensions for this, but it helps the appearance for those who want to hide sub-folders/labels until you navigate to them.
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Re:Is that so? (Score:5, Insightful)
Except that you've completely broken the file paradigm that's dominated people's understanding of information storage for the last several millennia. I'll use another webmail service, Yahoo Mail, as a counterpoint since I'm familiar with both (I assume you are; if not, they're both free to sign up for).
In Gmail, when I want to "move" an email to a "folder", I have to:
1: Open the file, or check the box next to it.
2: Click on 'More actions'
3: Click on the label I want to assign
4: Click on 'Archive'
In Yahoo Mail, to accomplish the same task, I:
1: Click on the message
2: Drag-and-drop it to the new folder
Half the number of steps, and it doesn't require learning a new paradigm.
You need to go relearn the definitions of "seamlessly", "easily", and "completely".
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Right.... (Score:5, Funny)
"Google as an organization is not geared - culturally - to delivering enterprise class reliability to its user applications."
Whew, good thing Microsoft is.
Re:Right.... (Score:5, Funny)
And by the way, it's not enterprise-class, it's Constitution-class. Sheesh.
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Re:Right.... (Score:5, Interesting)
Yeah... sounds funny from the perspective of those of us who have suffered through the microsoft monopoly. But given that most organizations can't tell their asses from their elbows they may well be right. Google seems to grow and progress by throwing lots of young smart people at the problem, but the problem seems to be a moving target from day to day. But microsoft has managed to hold down a monopoly for 20 years.
Who are you going to take business process advice from? While microsoft's ethics are dubious at best it's very hard to argue with success.
-- godwin filter removed reference to unethical but successful leader --
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Re:Right.... (Score:5, Interesting)
Who are you going to take business process advice from? While microsoft's ethics are dubious at best it's very hard to argue with success.
But why latch onto the tail end of a 20-year-old monopoly who by all rights is beginning to falter, and seems to have no vision at all for the next 20?
That's what would worry me more. It's not what a company has already done, but what they're wanting to do.
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Re:Right.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Falter may not apply here. Most people see the consumer end of the business. They see Google Search, and Apple Macs & ipods. MSFT keeps delivering what businesses want. So you & I may be perplexed at say, SHAREPOINT, but right now if you know SP you're employed- it's hot beyond comprehension. You got another version of server and sql server (sales up 30% qtr over qtr)... Get the idea. Profits are likely to go up, not down. Server rooms are getting more licenses not less.
Google & Apple keep moving their targets and MS keeps moving theirs as well. They are just so huge that they touch everything. So they may not be the best at search or selling tunes, and that may make them look like they are faltering, but they have allot of other stuff to sell you that pulls you into the ecosystem.
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You beat me to it (Score:5, Interesting)
Everything microsoft does is geared towards department level computing. Their entire AD implementation is right out of 1986; Netware had better enterprise features. And somebody better tell Microsoft that had they simply used LDAP, they wouldn't have to blow billions on AD. Provisioning and employee lifecycle? They're the only major software company in the world with no solution there.
Their products ooze of something designed for a company with 100-1000 employees. Imagine that you have apps that when installed force servers to reboot. Imagine your major subsystems run as services so it becomes problematic when you what process level isolation of app server. Imagine to get an app server, you *must* install IIS. Imagine that when you want multiple versions of .NET, it's not as simple as just having multiple directories for each instance, you actually have to *install* it on the server with admin privileges.
My MS rep called the other day, and I said not interested since they have no enterprise architecture tools. He tried to sell me Sourcesafe and MS's IDE because "it has architecture tools in it". I pointed out that software engineering is not equal to enterprise architecture except in a most tangential way. He had no idea what I was talking about except to ask what "my definition" of Enterprise Architecture is. When a salesman has to challenge his customer that they don't understand, he/she is clearly not atuned to what's happening in the IT industry.
It goes on and on. It's like the entire thing at MS was designed by CompSci students who are killer coders, but don't have any idea of how to do things like master data management. They have no concept of a TDS versus an ODS. Everything at MS is a hodge-podge of cute little features that break down as soon as you try to do something more complex than "write a killer web page that pulls inventory in real time from a data base". Mind you, that's a great app for a small company, but stuff that you can do faster/cheaper with free solutions like linux/apache/mysql. I don't need to actually pay a large company for software licenses for crap like that.
Ironically, the scientists at MS have some great ideas and understand these concepts really well. The products, however, reflect none of that work. They're too busy locking in the OS with products. Like they're afraid their stuff won't sell on it's own, so you've got to buy the whole kit and kaboodle
I see MS as headed for a cliff as fast as their sales will take them. They're doomed in the same way IBM was doomed back in the late 80's.
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Re:You beat me to it (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Right.... (Score:5, Interesting)
The quote about Google being run by engineers immediately caught my eye too. I've been a Microsoft employee for 2 years after doing contract jobs there since 1990. My perspective is that it has shifted from a being highly dominated by engineers to one that is pretty much run by HR and PMs, in that order. There is more focus on career development than I've seen anywhere else. There is a highly detailed process of setting and evaluating commitments, which is designed to give the review process greater transparency, and I think also to make the system more objective and foolproof. But a lot of a person's review consequently hinges on skillfully setting commitments rather than being talented. Toward the end of the fiscal year when many projects are in a crunch, I hear people say things like, "I don't care, I've hit all my commitments."
Microsoft is still a good company with lots of smart colleagues, a nice work environment and great benefits, but it's also a very large company that has reached the stage of having a hell of a lot of people who don't seem to do a lot and get paid a lot more than engineers. I had to chuckle when the blogger said he couldn't tell what Google managers did, because I often have that feeling at Microsoft.
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Organization is everything... (Score:5, Interesting)
You don't have to be, when the entire on-line world is your beta test laboratory.
Re:Organization is everything... (Score:5, Insightful)
The difference between Microsoft and Google in this regard is that users pay to beta test Microsoft's sofwtare without being told it is, at best, in beta quality. Where as Google invites (initially selectively) people to try the product and provide feedback. They're in beta for a very long time because they want it to be stable before declaring version "1.0". Small contrast, but expectation goes a long way towards the perception of quality.
If I'm paying money for retail software, I expect a rock solid product, not the buggy POS that I have to wait for the first Service Pack to use even the most basic functionality.
Google is up front with the fact that their software is not necessarily ready for prime time and users can hedge their bets accordingly. That said, Google beta products are often many times better than the "final version" of software from other vendors.
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Re:Organization is everything... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Organization is everything... (Score:5, Insightful)
You'd think an 18,000 person company would be able to release a finished project once in a while.
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Re:Organization is everything... (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm not trying to make an argument in defense of slipshod work, but rather point out that any piece of software of any scope is hard work and in many cases the result of heroic individual efforts. Just offering a bit of perspective from a point of view people sometimes forget. Not asking for gratitude, here, just a little respect for the efforts of people often demeaned as code monkeys and asking for a bit of appreciation for those allowing the mostly free and unobstructed flow of information at a scale unprecedented in history. It doesn't matter which company is wrapping the output, this still holds true. Cool?
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Money talks (Score:5, Insightful)
When I hear "...is not geared - culturally - to delivering enterprise class reliability to its user applications" as a reason to leave a company that's NOT microsoft to go work FOR microsoft, I have to wonder exactly how large the dump truck full of money was.
Re:Money talks (Score:5, Funny)
You are thinking small. Ask how many dump trucks full of money.
Microsoft may consider it worthwhile to throw money at developers to keep them from working for google.
Of course some people are going to choose Microsoft over Google. Just like there are some people that like wasabi flavored ice cream. There are freaks everywhere.
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Hypocrisy or cluelessness? (Score:5, Funny)
"Google as an organization is not geared -- culturally -- to delivering enterprise class reliability to its user applications." - Sergey Solyanik
As opposed to Microsoft, which seems to be not geared - professionally - to delivering enterprise class reliability to its user applications.
I don't know what "PMs" are (Score:5, Funny)
The reason is obvious (Score:5, Interesting)
To waste time vs eyeballs (Score:5, Interesting)
but most of them primarily help people waste time online (blogger, youtube, orkut, etc)
No, these are things to sell eyeballs for advertisers. That's what Google is about, making money with selling ads around easy to use and "fun" tools.
that'll teach me (Score:5, Funny)
I've worked at both (Score:5, Interesting)
I've worked at both. In terms of working environment, I found them both to be good, though in different ways (better food, more excitement at Google; private office at Microsoft). In terms of quality of life, I prefer Seattle, but in terms of jobs and networking, the Bay Area wins. In terms of software development processes, Microsoft's may look better on paper, but Google's seems to be better at actually delivering. In terms of management... Ballmer makes me wince. So, so far, it's a toss up.
The question to me is where each company is going. When Google release a new product, there is buzz and excitement, and usually something expensive and complicated gets cheaper and simpler. When Microsoft releases a new product, people either shrug or shudder and hold on to their wallets. Microsoft keeps trying to change things (Zune, Live, whatever), they keep buying companies (Danger, whatever), and it just doesn't seem to be working for them. Given the choice, I'd probably choose to work for Google; I just don't see Microsoft going anywhere.
In other news... (Score:5, Funny)
...several sales associates left Walmart for Target.
Anecdote equals exodus? (Score:5, Insightful)
Also someone who complains when "Everything is pretty much run by the engineering" and who uses phrases like "delivering enterprise class reliability to its user applications" is a marketing droid and should not be trusted. As a sidenote I find it funny that he criticizes Google's offerings with the statement "most of them primarily help people waste time online" listing Blogger as his first example, on Blogger itself.
Here's why (Score:5, Interesting)
There's a system of levels at Microsoft, and the "interestingness" of work, range of influence and pay depend on the levels (within limits predetermined for each level).
It's a well known fact that the easiest way to get a level increase at the higher levels is to leave Microsoft and then come back. Some folks jump over two levels after just two years outside the mothership - this is simply not achievable if you're L63-64. Sergey returned as (at least) L65. Good for him. Skipping his blog drivel, let's not assume that he did it for anything but a bag of cash and a large signing stock grant.
That said, Microsoft _is_ a great place to work, if you can ignore the bureaucracy. The pay is good, the benefits are second to none (no free lunches, tho), you get your own office (most of the time, anyway), and if you have a family, there's simply no better large tech company to work for.
They are very similar... (Score:5, Interesting)
They are both huge huge corporations.
They both have a ton of acquired businesses, products, and services that are buried in their rubble of bloat.
And they both, to this day, only make money from selling what got them into the business in the first place. For google that would be Adsense, and for MS, Windows and Office.
So whichever company you choose, you probably won't make a difference, just like all the failed developers before you.
Huh? (Score:5, Funny)
So Google isn't "geared... culturally" to deliver enterprise class reliability.
What's Microsoft's excuse?
Its a tough world out there (Score:5, Interesting)
I've worked at a number of big, slow, sclerotic corporations. Each time I've left, I've been told stories about how tough the world is on the outside and how others who have attempted to make a go of it have returned. When I look at the people who returned, it became clear that the big, cruel world is an excellent filter for the sorts of people who can take risks and produce results. Those who can't will return to the womb. These people returning make the 'mommy company' all that much slower and bloated.
I've been approached to return, but if the company couldn't make it worth my while to get me to stick around, things have only gotten worse since I've left.
Re:Cost of Living? (Score:5, Funny)
No doubt that's why the bookstores all have huge sections on 'dealing with depression' and great titles like 'bad weather, good mood' and 'gray skies aren't the end'.
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Re:Cost of Living? (Score:5, Funny)
As a resident of the weather-blessed United Kingdom, I say: "HAH!"
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Re:Cost of Living? (Score:5, Funny)
As a Seattle resident, I can tell you that 1) the bookstores have no such thing
Out of stock in Seattle isn't really a defense...
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Re:Cost of Living? (Score:5, Interesting)
the bay area is VERY cool. I live here, so I know.
but life at google is not life in the bay area. google is its own sub-culture in every way. note, I don't mean that in a good way.
what good is being in sunny calif when you are slaved (peer pressure) to work till 9pm? driving home at dark kills a lot of the fun of sunny california...
you want both weekends? to yourself? really? again, google is not the place for you.
if you want to ENJOY the bay area, google is not the place. free food != 'good lifestyle'.
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Re:Cost of Living? (Score:5, Informative)
- Seattle average home cost - 400kish
- Bay area home cost - 600-650kish
- WA state taxes - 0
- CA state taxes - pwned paycheck
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Re:Cost of Living? (Score:5, Insightful)
No, I didn't RTFA, but I'd guess the quality of life in Seattle is about, oh, one billion times better than the Bay Area.
Having lived at both places, being a native Washingtonian I would bluntly call BullS*** on the quality of life being better in Seattle than the Bay Area.
They are both over-urbanly developed, they both are full of self-egrandizing, gutless prigs who equally would be lost in the Cascades, regardless of their cozy home in Snoqualmie Falls or North Bend, et.al.
The problem with the IT Industry is that it has discovered that their centers for the Industry haven't changed in over 30 years.
Sure they've expanded into the suburbs of Portland, but on the West Coast you have Silicon Valley, Seattle and the LA region.
The East Coast is fixated with New York, Boston and various universities of reknown to be incubators for more startups stuck in what? Overly priced, pretentious cespools.
Look around. The best places to see growth aren't the sexy urban centers, or mystical retreat forrests in certain zones across the U.S.
They are in areas that offer actual growth and a solid standard of living, a variety of outdoor options and a midscale urban life.
The problem is they aren't saturated with every pindick fixated on the latest gadgets.
The Cost of Living in the Bay Area sucks big hairy donkey balls. It's sucked since the early 90s so that's nothing new.
The Cost of Living in Seattle has sucked big hairy donkey balls since 1996, as well.
Corporations would better serve themselves by providing regional zones where they develop centers for specific products/services and then use Networks to coordinate all this activity.
Dumping everyone onto Redmond's campus or Infinite Loop One's campus [my second favorite to work at next to NeXT], Google's et.al, aren't inherently going to produce think tanks of brilliance.
An example of an area that is burgeoning, but only in the BioMedical Fields is Spokane, WA.
If you're in these fields they've got jobs coming out of every orifice. Growth is strong, the summers are a scorcher [I grew up there] and the 4 seasons are solid. The city would have become a much larger hub if Expo '74 hadn't destroyed the second largest hub of trains west of Chicago but we can't go back in time to fix that mistake.
The bigger problem with the IT Industry is how many damn people do you need to write Web Services Applications? Really, now. How many? Every f'n device gets a rowdy two thumbs up if it has the ubiquitous Web Services, Web Browser, huge data plans and apps to show them where they can find the nearest movie, restaurant and more.
When is the IT Industry going to start seriously working with the traditional industries and streamline them into the 21st century?
I don't need multiple portable devices. I need solutions to improve a crumbling US Infrastructure, but instead we've got people just a year younger than myself whining about career growth differences between Google and Microsoft.
F*** OFF. Instead of being a Development Manager, actually find something that is screwed up that computers could fix and fix it.
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Re:Cost of Living? (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Cost of Living? (Score:5, Informative)
Crappy weather? The south bay area, where Google is located, is widely considered to have some of the most consistently pleasant weather of anywhere in the US. It's 70-85 and sunny for 3/4ths of the year.
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Re:Cost of Living? (Score:5, Insightful)
The fact I can afford a house on a software engineer's salary in Seattle, but not San Francisco?
1) If we're limiting this to specific cities, then yes.
2) Otherwise, if we're talking areas, then not quite.
3) And you can always rent, which is much cheaper than a 30 year mortgage. If you want, save the difference and invest in CDs (the financial kind!) or another safe investment. In 30 years, just buy the property outright (or pretty close to outright).
They both have crappy weather, so everything else equal, Seattle wins.
1) Are we limiting this to specific cities?
2) Otherwise, absolutely no way. SF weather is uniquely SF. Go across the SF Bay to Oakland on the same day and it'll be nice and sunny. Cold in SF? Drive down to San Jose.
Plus, growing up in Oregon, I have an ingrained hatred towards anything California.
That really says it all.
Here's what I have to say about Oregon: Socialized gasoline pumps.
I drive up there, and when I go for gas (god forbid), I can't get an attendant to come out and pump for my car. But all hell breaks loose when I've waited for 20 minutes (after 2-3 waves of Oregonians are serviced ahead of me) and touch that gas pump. That's right! It's illegal to pump your own gas. For a state of people that are supposedly very constructionally conservative about the Constitution and taxes, you'd think people would be able to pump their own gas. Instead they've legislated into existence an entire labor class. So, whenever I see this hatred expressed toward CA, I just think, "hypocrites."
But yet, I don't hate entire states. I have better things to do.
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The worste? (Score:5, Insightful)
Seattle has extremely mild weather year round that rarely causes enough discomfort that proper clothing can't fix. At worst its just cloudy too many days of the year. If you think that's the even remotely close to the worst you really should leave your bedroom sometime. 1 month in Tokyo during the rainy season will show you what messed up weather really is. A down poor at 80 degrees with extreme humidity in June is a lot worse than 60 degrees with overcast. A monsoon interrupting 100 degree whether is messed up, especially when you aren't surrounded by palm trees and coconuts.
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Re:Standing out (Score:5, Interesting)
Could not the "wiz kid" with a few freash ideas garner much more attention in such an envirnoment. And perhaps in doing so come more to the attention of the offer makers at google?
From personal experience as an engineer within a top-heavy business (although not with Microsoft) is that really there's no way to shine. They want you to do the job they want you to do and if there's something wrong with the process, the app, or the architecture there's no recourse.
If you want to learn a lot, be challenged and be a star, you need to be in a startup atmosphere. While I am sure there are many companies with that atmosphere, currently it seems as though the most public large company like that is Google.
Don't look at anything outside of tech if you want that atmosphere either. Non-tech companies (insurance, credit card companies, etc.) are run by business people and programmers are always a red in their ledger, they don't have a clue on how to deal with them.
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