Why I joined Microsoft

https://hackernoon.com/the-best-career-advice-ive-received-so-far-is-never-turn-down-an-interview-7586ca5b7ef8

by sharjeelsayed • 9 years ago

84 45 9 years ago

vosper• 9 years ago

Proud thinker. Avid creator. Devoted explorer. Incurable student. Humble Gopher. Principal Developer Advocate @Microsoft.

TL;DR, she's really taking the advocacy thing seriously: apparently Microsoft is amazing (and there's a subtle digestion that Pivotal doesn't pay as well, and maybe isn't a interesting)

haskellandchill• 9 years ago

Pivotal doesn't pay well but it can be plenty interesting.

VengefulCynic• 9 years ago

  “There is no loyalty in business, Ashley.
  You’re a single mom. You have a family and you owe it to them to see this Microsoft interview through.”

A truth that is not repeated nearly often enough by employees.

toomuchtodo2• 9 years ago

Indeed. Don't love your job because it isn't going to love you back.

deathhand• 9 years ago

I don't like this comment because individuals can "love working with you" and make sure that there is always a necessary flow of capital(if possible).

ocdtrekkie2• 9 years ago

I have never worked at a place that acted like it didn't care about me as an individual. Of course, I've always worked at smaller orgs too. I've never worked somewhere over 200 people or so.

analyst74• 9 years ago

A company has no loyalty, but people you work with do.

matt_wulfeck• 9 years ago

And that's often one of the biggest considerations you should make when switching jobs. Your current coworkers will be by far your best job connections in he future, so do them well by leaving gracefully.

pjmlp2• 9 years ago

Fully agree, that has been my motto since I went through a few companies that decided to fire people at random.

The loyat is to the fellow team mates, those are the friends that may even work with us across several companies.

Now the company itself, it is good if we can say that we feel proud to work at company X, but that is about it.

atdt• 9 years ago

  It turns out that Microsoft has the largest number of the top 500 Open Source projects for any one entity.

Top 500 according to whom / what?

ddlutz• 9 years ago

I was curious about this myself, but it looks like they are the highest open source contributor on Github according to https://octoverse.github.com.

dankohn1• 9 years ago

In my measurement of the 30 highest velocity open source projects [0], Microsoft has VS Code, .NET and Office Developer.

[0] https://www.cncf.io/blog/2017/06/05/30-highest-velocity-open...

pjmlp2• 9 years ago

A few Haskell and OCaml researchers are also on MSR payroll.

They are also contribuing for Go on Windows and the main contributors for Go tooling on VSCode.

43224gg252• 9 years ago

"Because they hired me".

nickpsecurity• 9 years ago

Microsoft is such a huge corporation that it has many teams that act totally opposite one another. Being in or dealing with any one can blind you to what the overall company is like. It seems she's in one of the better groups. Personally, I've always loved Microsoft Research specifically since they do great stuff. Practical example: their driver, verification tool is the reason it doesn't blue screen so much anymore. They did another OS (VerveOS) proven safe down to assembly. Neat stuff. Then, there's the groups pushing garbage on enterprises with plenty of lock-in. Then, there's also what I read where the workers in many parts have a pretty stable job whose environment and structure works out better than usual for women, people with families, or just those wanting work/life balance Silicon Valley usually won't give them. The bigger tech companies often rate better than startups and such on those points.

Overall, though, I think she's wrong about Microsoft changing. They're not. They have patents, copyrights, and data/protocol lock-in guaranteeing billions a year in profits for them. Changing would cost them much of that which will never happen. Far as open-source, they've gotten over a billion dollars off Android alone in patent royalties from their legal team despite doing everything they could to eliminate Android in favor of Windows Phone. Royalties not earned for sure. They did some Linux contributions to support running it on their own hypervisor pursuing more lock-in at other levels. Even many of the MS Research inventions are patented with who knows what risk. They continue to pay off politicians to make things worse for the rest of us like in U.S. w/ patent/copyright laws or Munich trying to uproot the FOSS conversion. They're the same, evil company that's trying to adjust to a FOSS-friendly world in a way that lets them suck money out of that too at everyone's expense.

All that said, you can make an impact if you work at Microsoft on improving one of their huge, legacy products. Or even a new one with a high-chance of adoption. It might be a decent choice if aiming for the greater good. An easy example would be anything stopping code injection in Windows systems would be great in terms of damage prevented for that user and anyone their box DDOS'd. Reliability or integrity of data, too, as who wants to loose their most critical files at the worst time. Definitely good to be done even if they're evil. Just gotta determine if you want to do good for Microsoft's customers or improve things that will keep people away from them.

rdtsc2• 9 years ago

As a Developer Advocate, you’re spreading awareness and enabling developers to do what they love; write, code, and learn.

Can someone explain that some more how that position is supposed to work. Maybe an example where DA made an impact for them personally. Otherwise that description sounds a bit like a rename of the traditional HR department.

ocdtrekkie2• 9 years ago

I don't understand how you view Developer Advocates like HR. Developer Advocates work with external developers using and building on your platforms. Wholly different skill set, nothing to do with employee management.

vxNsr• 9 years ago

The confusion stems around the word "developer" OP is thinking of internal devs, while the role is actually about interfacing with outside devs who will be using/extending products and services the org makes. It's an easy mistake to make if you don't give it too much thought because there's no inherent explanation in "Developer Advocate" that would indicate we're talking about outside devs.

rdtsc2• 9 years ago

I don't understand how you view Developer Advocates like HR.

Well I don't understand that's why I asked. But I see that just lead to down-votes and confusion.

Developer Advocates work with external developers using and building on your platforms.

Ah! I thought they are advocating for internal developers. As in "management and other departments don't have developers' needs in mind but the person in this position does, and they serve as point of contact for help".

fenomas• 9 years ago

A developer advocate is someone who advocates the company's offerings to developers, and makes sure feedback from developers reaches internal teams. In practice this usually means going to a lot of dev conferences, making speeches, working with product management, making tutorials and sample apps, and stuff like that.

So, borderline relationship with marketing, nothing at all to do with HR. Source: former developer evangelist.

gaius3• 9 years ago

A Developer Advocate or Evangelist is a sort of guerrilla marketing role. The aim is to get people to use their employer's product same as any other marketing position, but they do it by pretending to be just a normal developer who happens to love company X's products.

Y'know it's kinda like Instagram models - they look like they're just cool people going on amazing vacations, but it's all actually paid for by sponsors, like the airline.

simonswords82• 9 years ago

Y'know it's kinda like Instagram models - they look like they're just cool people going on amazing vacations, but it's all actually paid for by sponsors, like the airline.

Superb analogy!

bsaul• 9 years ago

ms still has a long way to go imho.

i recently thought about developping my backend on fsharp with dotnet core, on a mac. Well, let me just say that the commitment of ms to some of their open source projects leave to be desired. documentation is painfully hard to find ( compare to apple or even java main web frameworks, where everything is neatly organized in one place), community is inexistant, the main "getting started" videos on youtube is obsolete ( project file format changed in the meantine)... And the only fsharp plugin for vscode is developped by a third company and requires mono to be installed, for some reason.

Maybe it's just that nobody uses fsharp though. So then i tried to find some general architectural overview of asp.net core, and i didn't even know where to start looking. Ms documentation site is a maze, and you can only find short articles on very detailled subject, but nothing really top down.

Now the reason for all that is of course that the MS users ecosystem is made of consulting companies selling "experts", and training companies selling training. Nobody there has any interest in good, free, online resources.

oblio• 9 years ago

They truly have a long way to go, especially concerning awareness.

But I feel that things will pick up once they release dotnet core 2.0, which will support dotnet standard 2.0, basically the equivalent to the Java base libraries. Up to now things were still in flux and nobody serious wanted to touch the stuff. Now they've mostly settled down.

RandyRanderson• 9 years ago

Tl;DR Is one of the reasons job security? I bet it isn't.

2014 18k jobs - https://www.wired.com/2014/07/microsoft-layoffs/

2015 8k layoffs - http://fortune.com/2015/07/08/microsoft-layoffs/

2016 3k - http://fortune.com/2016/07/28/microsoft-layoffs-thousands-ph...

2017 Q1 700 - http://www.businessinsider.com/about-700-microsoft-employees...

2017 Q3 3k-5k https://techcrunch.com/2017/07/06/microsoft-confirms-layoff-...

It's hard to tell if the numbers overlap. For context MS has about 100k employees.

Markoff• 9 years ago

yeah and those are only direct employees, i worked for Microsoft vendor and we had ratio 1 Microsoft employee to 150 outsourced workers

project on our site shrinked from 150-200 at peak to 25-30 in the end

gaius3• 9 years ago

though I was getting daily emails from Microsoft recruiters

Really? They were emailing every day? I call shenanigans, no-one wants to hire ANYONE that badly...

I sat there with my jaw on the floor–for those of you who don’t know what Cosmos DB is, it’s the first globally distributed, multi-model database service for building planet scale apps

Started doing the evangelism already I see! This whole blog post is just a PR puff piece! That line is pretty much taken verbatim from the CosmosDB website - "planet scale apps" indeed.

For those that were wondering what Developer Advocates do it's exactly this: write blog posts as if they're just engineers like you, but rave about how amazing their employers are.

FWIW I even like Microsoft, Azure is my cloud of choice, but this kind of marketing activity is pretty condescending in my personal opinion. I like to keep things on a pure engineering level, technical merits only, warts and all.

ensiferum• 9 years ago

Yup exactly. The contents of the article can be summed:

"Look at me I'm so amazing that ppl want to recruit me daily! Look at Microsoft it's so amazing! Our tech is amazing! We're so amazing."

gaius3• 9 years ago

In politics it's called astroturfing, i.e. fake grassroots.

onion2k• 9 years ago

Really? They were emailing every day? I call shenanigans, no-one wants to hire ANYONE that badly...

It might just indicate that Microsoft's recruiters don't talk to each other.

qb45• 9 years ago

CosmosDB

Indeed, given projects like Google Spanner the stuff she wrote about CosmosDB doesn't really sound that jaw dropping. Devil is in the details, I suppose, but still no reason to make it sound as if global replication and high uptime were something unheard of.

Also, regarding open source, I presume it's still Microsoft just publishing source code for some of their products but not really cooperating on their development with other parties that much or giving up total control over them?

Though I wouldn't necessarily want to imply that she deliberately wrote it as a PR piece. Depending on her background (of which I know nothing), I suppose she could plead Hanlon's razor wrt to at least some paragraphs ;)

kodablah• 9 years ago

This whole blog post is just a PR puff piece!

Yup, as I read one part praising open source adjacent to another part praising a closed-sourced, single-cloud-vendor-only DB it became clear what this was.

derhorizont• 9 years ago

Specifically in reply to your messages, but also relevant to any others replying to you or not having done enough DA research:

False. I can relate albeit not having that kind of attention, but had my current manager continually try to hire me for months and get me to interview (which I don't go out of my way saying either because it doesn't make sense to and I want others to think well of me because of my skills--which they often think higher of than I do myself) and she is much more knowledgeable and regarded in the community than me so I am not remotely surprised she was contacted so much and I know for fact that these daily calls DID happen--the ONLY reason she mentioned it was to explain why the process moved so quickly--not so she can go pat herself on the back because she is humble. Maybe you should go look her up on Twitter. She didn't amass a ton of followers for PR/marketing fluff. She's well known in the community due to the contributions she has made and has done a lot of great TECHNICAL things to help people learn e.g. https://github.com/ashleymcnamara/learn_to_code

Developer advocate is a widely used term and you can't assume a general definition. I am a developer advocate myself and part of my role is being a software engineer--I am in an engineering org, report to an engineering manager, and this means I code ON the project just like every other software engineer here, just not as my entire role. The difference is I also speak at conferences, make blogs/training material so that people in the community can learn more about how to use the product(s) (not market fluff). Whether it's coding on their team's project(s), coding on external open source software, or creating demo code, MANY developer advocates are partaking in the technical side themselves and they have to be very knowledgeable to be able to write the technical content in blogs independent of whether it's something they created or not.

You realize this is a post about why she joined, not a general thoughts on the company or a technical overview, right? Therefore it will be the positive things. Also, it can't be just technical merits when you are deciding to join a company. It takes interesting topics and good engineering of course, but also great managers, great team members, a vision, what you'll be working on, etc. She wrote this to explain to people why she switched to Microsoft, not as anything to do with her job.

I, and I am sure others, would appreciate it if you would please get off your high horse and go study up more on facts before you partake in condescending activity yourself by shitting on/slamming someone for something you haven't researched enough on. In this case it could include asking more of "what will you be doing?". And in general, it is best to avoid those types of things in general. Maybe give some technical feedback to posts instead with useful feedback/how to improve things and not dumping on it independent whether you agree with it or not.

Also, go look at some talks/blogs etc from Developer Advocates (and similar titles like Technical Evangelist, Principal Technologist) in the community that include plenty of technical (vs marketing) content and help people learn such as:

Francesc Campoy https://twitter.com/francesc at Google https://github.com/campoy/go-tooling-workshop

Abby Fuller https://twitter.com/abbyfuller at Amazon Web Services https://github.com/abby-fuller/ecs-demo

Scott Hanselman https://twitter.com/shanselman at Microsoft https://www.hanselman.com/blog/

Arun Gupta https://twitter.com/arungupta at Amazon Web Services

Julia Ferraioli https://twitter.com/juliaferraioli at Google (formerly a DA) http://blog.juliaferraioli.com/2015/11/containerized-minecra...

Kelsey Hightower https://twitter.com/kelseyhightower at Google https://github.com/kelseyhightower/kubernetes-the-hard-way

And many others.

cloudfierce• 9 years ago

|I, and I am sure others, would appreciate it if you would please get off your high horse and go study up more on facts before you partake in condescending activity yourself by shitting on/slamming someone for something you haven't researched enough on.|

Oh but it's so easy for them to do that vs actual research.

Thanks for your post above. Well said!

I, too, am on a DA team reporting through an engineering organization. Old school vendors were known to have their DA teams report through to product marketing in the past (think Intel, HP, Microsoft, IBM) but that's all slowly changing. I interviewed at MSFT in 2014 and ultimately didn't take the role because I didn't want to report into a marketing org (& told them as much). I'm giving a few here the benefit of the doubt that maybe that's where the comments are stemming from? Older information?

For the rest of the keyboard trolls: sorry that you hate your life so much that you have to expend energy in a negative way at people you don't know on the internet. It must suck feeling gross like that inside all the time.

bmsleight_• 9 years ago

TIL - Microsoft now uses git for the Windows code base. The blogs.msdn artcles linked by hackernoon was terrible, but hackernoon one line summary was good.

Maybe there have changed ?

Being able not to use windows at Microsoft is a surprise.

AJRF• 9 years ago

ashleymcnamara Proud thinker. Avid creator. Devoted explorer. Incurable student. Humble Gopher. Principal Developer Advocate @Microsoft. Creator of gopherize.me

"Principal Developer Advocate"

I see

jaclaz• 9 years ago

The impact I’ll have at a company like Microsoft will be huge and at the end of the day, that’s what it’s about, right?

Hmmm. Modest, not all over, but in spots.

sheraz• 9 years ago

The no-so-subtle cosmosDB pitch missed the real killer feature: mongodb compatibility And hipaa compliant.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/cosmos-db/mongodb-int...

I'm not shilling just a happy azure user.

type0• 9 years ago

MS has gone full circle now and they are on "Embrace" stage now. Just wait for "Extend" and then it will be on "Extinguish" all over again.

mwerty• 9 years ago

Reminds me of http://www.fakesteve.net/2009/11/hell-hath-no-fury-like-a-bo...

francesca• 9 years ago

Looks like this article was sponsored by MSFT.

Why I joined Microsoft

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