Why Your Startup Shouldn't Hire a Marketer from Microsoft

http://www.rocketwatcher.com/blog/2010/12/why-your-startup-shouldnt-hire-a-marketer-from-microsoft.html

by meadhikari • 16 years ago

33 28 16 years ago

CPops• 16 years ago

Good overview, but it's important to keep in mind that there are definitely some very talented people at Microsoft that have their creativity and talents strangled to death by layers of horrible management.

Reading some of these blogs about Microsoft's internal culture (Mini-Microsoft and others) illustrates this pretty clearly and makes for very fascinating reading.

jdp232• 16 years ago

Very true. I generally agree with what the article is saying -- and there are exceptions to every rule.

MiniMSFT and others are indeed fascinating reading.

rbanffy5• 16 years ago

I would never hire MiniMSFT. Taking him/her out of Microsoft would ruin some fun reading.

edit: OK... I would hire him/her, but only after he/she left Microsoft. Denying MiniMSFT such a rich source of inspiration would be inhumane.

goombastic• 16 years ago

Very to the point. I got in the wrong way, I am a startup marketer currently in a large company, and trust me it's nuts. The one thing people think about last is selling. Everything is about the running political score and I just don't get it. We have marketers who make 210K sitting around doing nothing much, even worse, they aren't interested in technology or the stuff they sell. Damn man, it sux, the money is good for the while though.

yesno2• 16 years ago

The feeling likewise: most C-level executives don't care about the well-being of their employees.

supermanwillfly2• 16 years ago

I am really amazed by the irony in the writer's bio:

"I’ve held senior positions at large global companies including IBM, Nortel, Siebel Systems (the world’s leading provider of CRM solutions acquired by Oracle), and Sybase..."

yesno2• 16 years ago

It's probably a very competitive market out there for her so perhaps she needs to "remind" her readers to hire her but not her ex-coworkers.

3pt14159• 16 years ago

I know her personally. This is what she currently does:

April comes into a startup that has a proven business model and brings it from 30ish people to IPO or acquisition. She is extraordinarily intelligent, technically knowledgeable, approachable, and successful. She is one of the key people in the Toronto tech scene, and even if she cut her teeth on big tech, she really is a growth phase startup person at heart.

With respect to this post, I actually don't care much for it, but some of her other ones are gold. Specifically I've liked:

http://www.rocketwatcher.com/blog/2010/10/marketing-metrics-...

http://www.rocketwatcher.com/blog/2010/05/a-new-marketing-fr...

http://www.rocketwatcher.com/blog/2010/11/startup-marketing-...

http://www.rocketwatcher.com/blog/2010/09/competitive-intell...

supermanwillfly2• 16 years ago

Interesting, thanks for sharing. I'll check those out.

savoy112• 16 years ago

The daily Microsoft bashing HN post. There are literally thousands of startups started by ex-Microsoft marketers, developers, sales people and they are doing great. Microsoft is definitely doing great as well.

People are smart and can adapt. They will fight for politics and budget in big organization and they will get work done at startups. Labeling someone as "non-hire" just because they worked in Microsoft is plain stupid. Neglecting so much success and real on the field experience - definitely not smart.

By the way, using the same logic - marketers from Google and Facebook shoud not be hired too? Or this will not appeal to the HN community, no Microsoft, so noone to hate.

Of course reading the OP author bio confirms that - senior positions at Siebel, IBM, etc - they are obviously THAT MUCH different from Microsoft, really. So much hypocrisy. So much bullshit.

Come on.

electromagnetic• 16 years ago

I'd hire a developer from Microsoft for sure. Solely for the reason that they have an inside knowledge with Microsoft products that your average developer might not, furthermore they might have enough connections that you can get insider-info on what might be involved in the next MS OS before everyone else gets the info.

johns• 16 years ago

I think you overestimate the knowledge an MS dev has outside of their team. Talk to any of them and you'll quickly find out how little they know outside their area. It's a very big company with a lot of silos.

jdp232• 16 years ago

Many of the same concerns apply to hiring developers from Microsoft. If it's just one stop on a varied career, or if it's combined with some open source activities, then I'm not too concerned; if it's their only full-time job or they've been there for a long time, then my initial reaction is concerned about what kinds of habits and mindsets they've fallen into.

axod• 16 years ago

The microsoft bashing here is pretty minimal. Hackers in general do not like microsoft because it makes sub par lousy buggy ill thought out products, operates morally questionable business practices, and is fairly incompetent with new products.

Microsoft got lucky, once, by being in the right place at the right time (And having the right connections).

I'm not saying I agree with the OP or not, but any microsoft bashing that goes on is more than warranted. They have crushed businesses, held back innovation, wasted millions of hours of peoples lives trying to make IE not completely suck, etc

They do not innovate to improve users experience, they act to defend their monopoly. Look at the mozilla vs IE story. Once IE was dominant, they shelved development of it for years - it had served its purpose, which was to crush mozilla and hold back innovation of the web as a platform.

Locke16894• 16 years ago

[citation needed]

Seriously though, some of the biggest operating systems (my research area, OS virtualization in specific) advances have come out of Microsoft Research and Windows kernel development.

rbanffy5• 16 years ago

> Microsoft got lucky, once

To be fair, they got lucky a good many times. They wrote a BASIC interpreter (MITS even paid them to work on that) for the nascent personal computer industry that was mostly there when needed.

Microsoft's BASIC was the first language many of us learned to program in. The other day I solved Google's "are you a programmer" tests using both an Apple //e and a TRS-80 Model III (emulated with MESS). It was nostalgic.

savoy112• 16 years ago

This is a ridiculous post and can be upvoted only here.

ajg1977• 16 years ago

Conversely you may find a person who, when free of the political, hierarchical, and prone to play it safe environment that is Microsoft marketing (or many departments in many large corp's), will become a fantastic hire and combine their new found responsibility with years of experience to completely out-manouver companies with far bigger budgets.

At the end of the day, if you place more weight on a the employment history of the candidate than the person, you may as well just flip a coin when determining whether they will meet your needs.

sedachv• 16 years ago

From personal experience, all four of the Microsoft marketing employees I've interacted with have been complete tools.

neworbit• 16 years ago

Reasonable enough to say that people with big-company backgrounds often have expectations that amount to "first I'll hire 4 people to do the job you are expecting me to."

I would hire someone from Microsoft over someone from IBM any day. But I agree, I'd rather try and find some disgruntled Yahoo worker and at this point that ought to be easier.

Why Your Startup Shouldn't Hire a Marketer from Microsoft

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