Microsoft Experience

[bugzpodder]

Maybe some of you know that I am an intern at Microsoft since January. Before we immediately start to flame me or Microsoft, please hear me out. I perfectly understand that some people here isn't so hot about Microsoft. I have no problems with that. but please let me ask nicely that please do not turn this thread into a flaming one. One could spend days arguing whether MS is evil or not, but ultimately sitting here and arguing is a waste of time. If you think MS is evil and nothing I say will change your mind, then this thread is probably not for you. Otherwise read on. Also, this is not another Google vs Microsoft thread. I haven't worked for Google. I only have a few of their interview questions. If you want to discuss Google, use another thread. Thanks.

So what is this about? I started this thread in the middle of the night because since the last few weeks, I want to share some experiences of working at Microsoft sort of like a mini-recruiting effort. I get no benefit from this and no one has asked me to do so, but I have seen many things in this company I am impressed about. There are also things about the company that i either didn't know about or had some misconceptions. The focus here is more about the experience as an intern/developer.

The good:
Product Diversity. Microsoft's presence is everywhere in the computing industry. From desktop software to the net to enterprise solutions to multimedia and gaming. This is something that no other company comes even close to. Whatever your interest is, you'll find something that suits you. Some of its latest and coolest offerings are Sharepoint (collaboration), Silverlight (think flash), Office live (and please don't say Google apps kicks its ass, since the beta just came out like this week and you probably have not even touched it), Surface (touchscreen)... I have recently being to MS's internal TechFest for R&D, and the amount of offerings they demonstrated is nothing short of amazing. For classified reasons I am not allowed to tell you what I saw, but take my word for it. AMAZING

Impact. It is no surprise that whatever you are developing will impact hundreds millions of users in this world. Did you know that even though firefox is so hot, IE still consists of 80% of the market, regardless of if this is what you call monopoly or not.. (btw, IE8's features rock). That's not something you always get elsewhere. There are also added challenges. when building an application, you have to think of everything from usability (what if user didn't have a mouse) to security to internationalization to compatibility. All of these are non-trivial issues.

Structure: Microsoft have a PM - DEV - TEST structure, where PM = program manager (designer-ish). You don't get these in most other places. Elsewhere you are probably required to be all three at once. That of course has its advantages and disadvantages. it promotes more of a team work experience, and makes you focus on what you do best. Of course, it also means that if you want to make some kind of change, you need to go through a lot of tape and stuff. For devs you also have a more senior dev to report to, and before you check in your change you always need that person to do a code review. Pretty damn efficient if you ask me -- helped me a lot in becoming better at what I do.

There are also some not so good elements, but there isn't actually too many that are relevant. For example not only there is no free food (although plenty of free beverages), most cafes closes at 3:30pm so you essentially can't get quality food until you go home. If you ask me what is the number one thing that annoys me worst, it is that they have this policy that you must run this test before you check in your code. Of course, it takes like 10 minutes to run (you need to do it for both debug and ship versons) and for larger applications I fear its probably much worse.

If anyone have questions I am more than happy to answer them here. Once again please don't treat this as a flaming thread, thank you. And no, I can't tell you what exactly I am working on, but I will tell you that I am working in web services in Office.

[MihaiG]

good stuff!


a couple of things,
where are you located at?
are you in redmond, cause thatd be kick ass if you were
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"

[Mackie]

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

[Dan]

Is MS encoraging there intern's to do there recument PR for them now or somthing? Becues that almost souned like an ad more then a post in parts :p

[sparta]

i DARE you to bring a macbook to work.

[Mackie]

Film it to if anything happens.

[rdrake]

sparta @ Sat Mar 15, 2008 12:31 pm wrote:

i DARE you to bring a macbook to work.

I've seen presentations done by people from Microsoft using MBPs.

[Tony]

As have I. Remember, Microsoft doesn't make laptops. And as a matter of fact, Microsoft has a whole Mac-dev devision (the entire Office suite runs natively on OS X).

@bugz -- I don't see how running a test suite is the "absolute worst" thing. Obviously they don't want anyone to check in code that introduce obvious bugs.

[bugzpodder]

There are something that escaped my mind when I made the first post. I went through two days of borrring orientation (which you get in most large corps). The only thing I remembered from it is this policy against open source. If I interpreted it correctly, MS employees are barred from contributing to Open Source (maybe with attached GPL license?) without special permission. That means on your own time as well. That's something I found surprising, and I had to quit and close my project on source forge (not that I did anything with that, but...). I don't have a direct quote of this policy, but i'll see if i can get one and posted here. I find that rule quiet frankly just ridiculously funny and I almost LOL. But it may have an impact on some people.

Quote:

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"

yeah I am at Redmond, and honestly the city sucks (I live in Seattle). no idea about World Wide Telescope. The interview process is different at waterloo and elsewhere. if you are a waterloo student you should know how it goes already, someone just come and interview you. If not, they'll probably fly you in if you are a qualified candidate. the interview style for each person is different depending on whos interviewing, so there isn't a whole lot I can say about that. But the questions usually involving one or two coding on the spot questions.

Quote:

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

I actually haven't heard of any people using Linux.. (usually they don't gloat around about using Linux and you can't tell from their laptop casing) but have definitely seen mac geeks. but firefox and google seem to be common ground, although there are some policies against using competitors technology in common work space.

Quote:

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

As I said I have never being told to do anything, but I thought it would be good idea to reach otu to some people on compsci.ca
and I honestly liked what I see here -- there has being so much unfair negative publicity about MS practices so quiet frankly I expected some negative things in my internship. But I was quiet surprised (not that I should be) that there were very little.

Quote:

Film it to if anything happens.

film and photos are prohibited in MS buildings and Ballmer/Gates' personal parking space (not joking). But people does break the rules one in a while. Here are two videos.

you need silverlight for this: very funny
http://www.microspotting.com/2008/02/life-at-msft-the-truth-revealed

Here are some people that are related to my group: funny too

http://youtube.com/watch?v=RmL1rWxDpd0

[md]

Can you explain the product development cycle more? Maybe explain how major revisions would work in such a cycle?

How large are the dev groups? Do you work with a half dozen or so people on one sub-project, or do you work as part of a large group on a major app?

Though you said you hadn't seen anyone using *nix on their laptops; is there any prohibitions against it? Also, if you could try and find the exact wording regarding open source projects (should be in any contract you signed) that would be excellent... I have a hard time seeing how anything that broad could possibly be enforceable.

Oh, what project(s) are you working on?

[Dan]

bugzpodder @ 15th March 2008, 1:29 pm wrote:

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

Other then not contritube to open source. I would never work for any company that says what i can or can not do in my own persoanl free time (epstaly my free time at home).

BTW, compsci.ca's terms of use say all posted materals are under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5 Canada License, witch could be seen as an open source linceses (esptaly if you post code), so you might want to watch out :p



In any case it is nice to hear about some of the inside stuff that goses on at MS and there empoly policys, also i am glad you are happy with your intership i sounds fun if you could take the no open source rule.

[bugzpodder]

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).

[Robert]

bugzpodder @ Sat Mar 15, 2008 3:12 pm wrote:

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).

Hold on, could you elaborate on that point? What do you mean by "you does not relate to microsoft"? (I'm assuming there's a typo somehwere in there)

[Tony]

"unless yours [that is, intellectual property] does not relate to microsoft..."

[Robert]

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