i DARE you to bring a macbook to work.

where are you located at?
could you describe the interview proccess that you went through and give us a background into what got you interested into microsoft,
also, can you give us more information on "world wide telescope"

Is there any amount of hate going around for other operating systems? If you got caught using Linux would they hit you?

Is MS encoraging there intern's to do there recument PR for them now or somthing?

Film it to if anything happens.

As I said I have never being told to do anything,

The dev groups obviously varies. I work in a small group, but for larger projects like a bigger windows/office group would involve considerably more people. I am under an agreement not to disclose internal processes except on a need-to-know bases (yes, that's lame, I know).

You will be working with some flavour of windows for development purposes (did you think we were developing *nix software?). and there is obviously no restriction for using *nix on your own machine.

Essentially the open-source thing is based on a clause in the contract that basically says:

Microsoft owns all intellectual property you produced at the time of employment (even on your own time) UNLESS you can establish that you does not relate to microsoft (anything internal, including ideas).

How would they determine whether it relates to microsoft or not? Couldn't they argue that all software is related to Microsoft?

It's actually very close to the edge of enforceable; my (IANAL) knowledge of contract law isn't quite enough to say which side it falls on however.

I think if you are a contributor to an open source app before you start working for microsoft (say mpd) and you get a job writing code for IE then they wouldn't be able to prevent you from continuing to work on mpd; as there is no overlap between the two projects. However, if you are a linux kernel dev and you start working on the NT kernel then your would be excluded. This is based on case-law, and only those cases I can recall off hand

Hey Bugz, great to hear that you are doing well. I heard a while back that working for a large corporation is frustrating because for almost every line of code you add to a project there are forms and meetings to ensure that the code is OK. I've heard that it's just a lot of frustration. I want to believe it's not true; that the guys at Microsoft still enjoy their work. What is your experience?

you need to disclose to your recruiter all your "inventions" before you sign the contract, otherwise Microsoft can take ownership of these intellectual properties. How is this enforcable? you sign a form which states something like this.

'Nother question: You said that all development work is targeted at windows (or mac), not *nix; however Microsoft DID publish xenix long, log ago. Might it be possible to acquire a copy still?

Hey Bugz, As I'm sure you've heard the Computer Club is doing very well this year (You're sorta like their grandfather You mentored Andy, Andy mentored them.) Frank asked me a question that I wasn't 100% certain of the answer. He asked if contest skills transfered to real-world programming. Obviously no one believes that there is a 100% correlation, but the fact that Top Coder uses contests to find new employees for companies tells me it's not a zero percent relation either. I have a gut feeling that the skills are not often used but are still valuable and help develop general problem solving skills. I guess there is no way for you to know for sure but do you feel that your contest training has helped you now that you are working on more real-world problems?

The best I've done is writing a recursive function here or there but even those are rare lol.

ou may not have written many recursive functions, but I suspect that is because the majority of Microsoft's tools (especially the "mainstream" ones) lack tail call optimization.