Microsoft's Treatment of Google Defectors 572
Miguel de Icaza (Note, this Miguel is not the Ximian developer, just someone whose small life is fulfilled by trolling under someone else's name) writes "Here is a story revealing just how threatened Microsoft is by Google. While senior partners can expect the full chair experience, some lowly staffers who are putting in their notice are being escorted off campus immediately. Why? Because they've put in their notice to join Google. In Microsoft's eyes, Google is Enemy No. 1. Anyone leaving Redmond for the search leader is a threat. Not because they'll scurry around collecting company secrets — as if Google's interested in Microsoft's '90s-era technologies. Departing employees, however, might tell other 'Softies how much better Google is. If an employee is leaving for Amazon.com or another second-tier employer which doesn't make Microsoft so paranoid, they'll probably serve out the traditional two weeks of unproductive wrapping up. So if you're planning on leaving Microsoft for Google, pack up your belongings and say goodbye to friends ahead of time. There'll be no cake and two weeks of paid slacking for you."
Microsoft is simply bland.. (Score:5, Insightful)
I have never worked for Microsoft and to be honest, I'd probably never want to. I think the key problem for Microsoft is that nothing they do is exciting anymore.
I think Vista has really damaged Microsoft. Not in terms of revenue, since a sale of Windows XP is still a sale for Microsoft. No, the damage is in morale. Vista was an absolute disaster for morale. They worked for a couple of years only to ditch it and start again from the Windows 2003 Server source-code. Nothing they put in to Vista was in anyway something you can get developers energised about. Every feature had nightmarish committees which destroyed any hope of motivation. They even developed anti-features like SecurePath that nobody cares about.
I read somewhere that Microsoft developers write something like 1,000 lines of code a year. Last-year, I contributed around forty times that to our source control at work. When you're paid so much to do so little - that has to destroy morale too. Most developers I know like to work.
Vista is a symptom of a much deeper problem. Microsoft doesn't know how to be sexy. it doesn't now how to to be secure and it doesn't know how to please it's users. Worst of all, it doesn't know how to make it's huge base of developers happy!
All of this makes Google a very attractive place. If all your talent walks right of your door, it isn't too long until there is no way whatsoever to fix any of the problems I've just mentioned.
Put more succinctly, Microsoft sucks and Google rocks.
Simon.
Paid slacking (Score:5, Insightful)
what's the big deal? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:"Put in their notice" (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:what's the big deal? (Score:5, Insightful)
Totally useless attempt at damage control (Score:4, Insightful)
If I worked at MS, gave notice that I was going to Google, and was immediately escorted out, I'd be much more inclined to e-mail my former co-workers and let them know what happened. I'd also willingly give them details about working at Google if they asked.
Re:This is an excellent example of... (Score:5, Insightful)
What makes you think it was a rational decision? Not all business decisions are rational. Far too often they are driven by a desire to control, frighten the employees and/or stroke the egos of managers.
Why give notice, then?Resign effective immediately (Score:5, Insightful)
>>If you're leaving these days it's not uncommon to get escorted to the door...
Then, if this is standard practice at your company, do not provide notice. Just quit, walk out, and never look back.
Clean out your office over the preceeding week, then simply say to your manager on the last hour of your last day "I quit, effective immediately. I'm not coming back tomorrow, and I did not give notice because of the poor way this company responds to those who resign (e.g. "perp walk"). Goodbye and good luck." Or just send them an email over the weekend. It might sound harsh but if they truly respond this poorly to resignations, you have nothing to lose anyway.
The funny part is, I'll bet the clueless executives have had at least one profanely expensive "retreat" this year where they listened to expensive consultants's opinions on boosting employee morale and/or commitment.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:what's the big deal? (Score:4, Insightful)
The job I'm in now, I should get "perp-walked" when I put in my notice (I have way too much systems access), but I doubt I will be, because they'll be desperate for me to train someone, and catch up my documentation. It's a trust position, though a number of people over me probably don't trust me...If I were them I wouldn't trust anyone, due to the amount of backstabbing they've been dealing in.
They're not always rational...It'll be interesting to see.
Re:what's the big deal? (Score:3, Insightful)
No, it's not. When I was about to quit my last job, I spent two weeks copying files (my personal files) and removing my personal things from the office. (As well as working late every night wrapping up my current projects.) Then I gave my notice and said goodbye. (Until the court case when I claimed my three months of overdue salary, but that's another story.) Anyway, if I had wanted to "steal" any company information, I would have done it long before I gave notice. So while you obviously will treat staff who give notice differently, treating them as if they have been unmasked as KGB moles is just dramatic posturing, and generates ill will. Not just in the departing staff, but everyone. What happens in three months time when the new staff have a problem they would like to consult with you about? You tell them to fuck off.
Agreed, but still a violation of trust (Score:5, Insightful)
Headline/title is misleading! (Score:4, Insightful)
From this heading alone, I'd conclude that defection is the other way round. That is to say, the defection is from Google to Microsoft.The story suggests otherwise.
But again, I could be wrong.
this might seem obvious but... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Totally useless attempt at damage control (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:what's the big deal? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:"Put in their notice" (Score:3, Insightful)
Dumb (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:not that uncommon (Score:2, Insightful)
> uncommon to be a perp walk, which sucks. It undermines the fabric of trust in the workforce
> generally and damages individual psyche specifically.
What IS this "fabric of trust in the workforce" of which you speak?? I think thats been gone for MANY years..
What a biased summary (Score:2, Insightful)
It's crap like this that makes me embarrassed to be a Slashdot reader. Way to go, CmdrTaco.
Re:"Put in their notice" (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Microsoft is simply bland.. (Score:3, Insightful)
When I was nearing university graduation in 1999, and my school was preparing the the annual job fair, I got a call from the Microsoft contingent offering to set up a programmer interview at the fair. I told the caller that Microsoft's business practices were so unacceptable that I would never be able to ethically work for them.
I graduated, got a shitty temp-to-hire corporate programming job for six months, quit, went unemployed for a year, then found the local government programming job I still hold today. I'm sure I make substantially less than if I had taken the Microsoft job (or any number of other out of state, corporate job offers I'd gotten), but I'm much happier where I'm at now than I would have been at Microsoft. I don't have to sacrifice my sense of ethics and morality at my job.
As an added bonus, I was responsible for getting rid of a number of Windows "servers" and replacing them with real servers running Linux. I also managed to change the entire job culture from "Windows-only" over to "Windows on the desktop, mostly Linux on the server". That's not bad at all considering how thoroughly Windows-entrenched the place was when I first got here. I even got formerly Linux-hostile employees to love Linux and hate Windows, and that was merely by showing them Linux's strengths and weaknesses (the strengths far outweigh the weaknesses).
Attitudes are slowly changing for the better, and Microsoft is being further forced onto the defensive as time goes by.
Re:Why give notice, then?Resign effective immediat (Score:3, Insightful)
In my last company, the standard practice was to immediately walk you out if you were going to a direct competitor. If you were not doing that, then you served out your final days like normal. I don't necessarily agree with that, but I think it is understandable.
Re:not that uncommon (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Paid slacking (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:what's the big deal? (Score:3, Insightful)
It used to be required on a lot of the employment contracts that I had, but now that at-will is around, the company tells you that they can't put wording like that into your contract.
However, they do request the "courtesy" of a two week notice. If you don't give one when you quit, you are being unprofessional. However, when they fire you with no notice, supposedly that is not unprofessional. In my opinion, if you treat the employee with respect, you can have respect back.
Re:not that uncommon (Score:3, Insightful)
> the first thing that should happen is that your manager should
> push a red button that instantly removes all access you have to
> computers and badge-access doors (or get that process started),
You got that (partly) wrong.
The problem is not that it doesn't get done on day one, the problem is
that people don't do it at all and leave accounts open for months
after people have departed.
Freaking out when an employee leaves and calling "Defcon 1" is stupid.
> and the second thing is calling security to escort them out.
As numerous people have said, this just generates bad mood in
other employees.
IMO, this practise is ridiculous in all cases other than when criminal offenses
are involved.
There are positions that are connected with enough trust-level that the company
might consider putting you on paid vacation for the time being - but that also
creates a bad mood in the other employees.
(Although a different kind - the individual can get a paid vacation for free)
I know these boiler-plate advice snippets very well, but they apply to supermaket till-girls at best:
jobs with no deep knownledge and qualification, but some control over money (or otherwise valuable good).
They also presume that the individual in question is totally and immediately replaceable - this is fictional at best.
If you escort them out on the spot, they actually carry out more information than if you had let them finish their work and tell their replacement the basics of the job.
And, think about this: in Germany, people usually have three or six months "notice time". That means, you can't just fire them and be done with it.
But it also means that the employee can't just go and leave over the weekend. Both have to find a way to get along for the rest of the time, because, like it or not, you always meet twice
Re:not that uncommon (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:what's the big deal? (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Microsoft is simply bland.. (Score:3, Insightful)
The people who are going to Google are going there presumably because Google is offering them something fun to work on or a new environment for them. I originally left Microsoft in 2000 to work at a startup for the same reason. I came back this year because - Slashdot imaginations notwithstanding - Microsoft is actually a great company to work for.
You guys talk about 'drinking the Koolaid' and how bad it is. Slashdot has its own Koolaid you know. How much of it are YOU drinking?
Re:Microsoft is simply bland.. (Score:4, Insightful)
But even then you can drill down. I said I was impressed that the Office division completely re-designed their UI-- then again, look at Office Live. They're putting out a product that virtually nobody wants, and selling it in a crummy way. And I'm sure you could go down another level and find a group within Office Live that's really kicking ass if you did the research.
Point is, Microsoft has 70,000 employees in the Redmond/Seattle area alone. They're freakin' huge. If you read an article saying IBM printer sales were down, you wouldn't assume that iSeries midrange computers are going to tank also. Remember the same applies to Microsoft.
If you were working at Microsoft Games, you wouldn't think your job sucked based on how Windows was received.
why would anyone tell them (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:what's the big deal? (Score:5, Insightful)
So you really don't want to leave them alone with their PC or phone.
Re:Microsoft do more than that (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:not that uncommon (Score:3, Insightful)
That's a pretty damned big "probably." If Microsoft does let those people serve out two weeks, then this article is actually making a point. If not, then this article is worthess trash. Does the author bother to find out which it is? Nope! Wild speculation all-around!
For all we know this is standard practice in all of Microsoft. Or, for that matter, there was just one manager not following the standard practices. Crap journalism.
Writing code is easy. Debugging it is hard (Score:5, Insightful)
1. IIRC that was a flawed metric anyway. That was final number of lines of code, divided by developpers, divided by time. It just isn't the same as what you seem to think it means. E.g., lines of code changed or refactored or whatever, would not be counted in that number.
Judged by that kind of a flawed metric, my contribution to some projects would actually be a negative number of lines of code per time unit. E.g., each time I moved someone's copy-and-paste code to its own method and replaced it with a call... well, let's say it was in 3 places, 20 lines of code, replaced with a method and a call each. That's minus thirty-something lines of code in a quarter of an hour by that metric. Am I the worst programmer ever, or what?
I'm sure CVS counts them for yours, though. So you're not comparing the same number.
Now I'm not saying that that alone accounts for that kind of a difference, but it's a start.
2. Just writing code is easy. It's debugging it that takes a lot of time. So the limiting thing is really how well you want that code to work. Going from, say, 90% caught bugs to 95% can easily double your development time on the whole... and thus halve your average lines per year.
Yes, I know, it's MS, but they still have a policy to not ship with known bugs. (Though obviously the unknown ones are more than enough in their own right.) So they'd inherently have less lines of code per year, compared to, say, Google which is officially a perpetual beta.
3. Lines of code / time doesn't scale linearly as the program complexity and team size grow. In other words, you can't just add man-months.
I thought I was so smart too in college, when I could write a program or module of several hundred lines of code in a day. But then that was the whole program, that was the whole complexity, and I was the whole team. That's the easy scenario.
Now move to something the size of Vista and it's just not the same thing any more. Now you suddenly have to deal with stuff like how your code works together with Tom, Dick and Harry's, what they want from your code, and what you need from theirs. There's a lot of overhead just to synchronize it all, document it all, learn other people's APIs, and deal with the increasing level of mis-understanding each other's interfaces.
Now I'm not saying that MS is necessarily the paragon of efficient coding anyway, but I am saying that a lot of people waving that number around... just aren't qualified to make that judgment. They've never actually worked on something that size, and that total team size. I've seen teams hit a wall and get bogged by the fact that each time one guy changes something, it broke some other guy's code, long before being anywhere near the size of MS or of Vista.
4. Well, I also don't like that metric because I've seen people actually abuse it. Not all lines of code are born the same.
E.g., my good coleague Wally would have topped that metric easily, because the guy just copied and pasted everything in sight to make it look like he's doing something. Not only he had whole open source projects pasted into his code tree, but also such surrealistic stuff as: a Swing (standalone GUI framework) file chooser dialog hidden deep in the source code of one of his EJBs (server-side thing.) That thing didn't serve any purpose. It was just there to inflate the number of lines of code he supposedly produced.
Replacing that monstrosity with something smaller and simpler, not only cut down the size (hence, less average lines of code per year for the team, ya know), but also made it run around 40 times faster.
You can also inflate the number of lines of code arbitrarily by just liberally mis-applying patterns. Just have everything get packed in a decorator, made by a factory, which is a singleton, register it with a manager, etc, etc, etc. The number of lines of overhead can be grown arbitrarily, without actually adding any functionality. And past a size wit
Re:Microsoft is simply bland.. (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:what's the big deal? (Score:4, Insightful)
Not necessarily true (Score:1, Insightful)
Maybe you're frog-marched out if you work in MSN, or search, or something directly competing.
As to "how much better it is at Google," from reports it seems to be a wash. MS appears to be a better place to work if you're raising a family (wonderful medical package -- way better than Google's -- understanding management, etc.), while Google seems to cater to the younger employees by making it possible to live your entire life without leaving the building.
I've worked at both kinds of companies (guess what? there were free lunches at Silicon Valley companies prior to Google). And I remember Apple in the 80s and early 90s where the unofficial policy was "bring 'em in and burn 'em out" (the sabbatical at five years was great for winnowing out the non-hackers). Big and slow (MS) is bad, because dinosaurs can stumble and living in a company town like Redmond isn't necessarily a great idea (just talk to some Boeing folks), but a quick and burn-outish place is bad because you're just going to be so much biological waste after a few years of 12-hour days ("Look, someone threw out a perfectly good software engineer!").
At any rate, escorting folks who have given notice is nothing new. Believe me, worse would be, "We're going to keep you here for two weeks," and then give you a blank walled office to sit in, with no network or access to anyone and escorts to the potty. Worse than that would be, "You're going to spend the next two weeks standing at a whiteboard doing a brain-dump of everything you've been responsible for on this project." [Been there; I'd made the mistake of giving *three* weeks notice, just to be nice, and my hands were cramped and my brain was leaking out my ears by the time I got out of there].
Re:what's the big deal? (Score:3, Insightful)
Well, if the last few backups were blank, it's clear she had been planning it.
Even if paranoid procedures had been in place, she would have trashed the systems just as well, only a minute before resigning.
Unproductive 2 weeks of wrapping up???!!! (Score:5, Insightful)
Said like a lousy manager, or one who doesn't appreciate what people actually do, or somebody who never worked in a large enough organization to appreciate the true cost of attrition, or I don't know what...
Excepting the departures of Truly Useless People, those last two weeks are somebody's last chance to find out that which you don't know about that which you are about to inherit. I am so sick of watching stupid managers and stupid successors squander that invaluable last chance because they act like scorned girlfriends or just don't understand the true value of even people who would leave, and the undocumented knowledge they carry in their heads.
I've never met a leaving person who wouldn't be helpful in his own succession. Most, in fact, are incredulous as to how little anybody seems to care about the invaluable knowledge they are walking away with, and how much more difficult their successor's lives will be for the ignorance.
Shape up, managers and everybody else. Those defectors leaving your ranks should be more valuable to you in those last two weeks than in any other two weeks of their employ.
Re:what's the big deal? (Score:2, Insightful)
with each other, the ones who leave will try to entice the ones who stay behind.
I've gotten 3 jobs that way in the last 10 years.
Don't Burn Bridges (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:what's the big deal? (Score:5, Insightful)
By escorting someone out, it could be an intentional signal to the other employees that you take this rivalry seriously. Or by letting them work the two weeks, it could be a signal that you are employee-friendly and there are no hard feelings. But the main concern really needs to be about how the remaining employees feel. There should be little concern about how the departing employee feels - except that it's often not a good idea to make enemies.
Re:what's the big deal? (Score:3, Insightful)
Access to some sensitive information, use of copiers and fax machines etc. could be restricted starting immediately, and then the mgmt may decide a few days (weeks) before the period of notice ends to change passwords, invalidate badges etc. during a lunch break (in a planned manner) and tell the employee he/she needs not to come in the next day. This way the employee does not know when is the last day, mgmt does.
I am a little surprised that in the US the mgmt have not figured the above out for themselves, it is not rocket science...
The only reason to escort the employee out are:
1. Make the employee feel bad with this show of authority and lack of trust. (Like the employer expects that the employee will start throwing chairs...)
2. The company compensation and/or work conditions are so bad that they want the leaving employee have minimal personal contact with the remaining staff to avoid losing other people. (Does not work.)
Um... so? (Score:3, Insightful)
How many here actually have a snowball's chance in hell to work for either of these companies?
Why does Slashdot care so much about the goings-on of the elitist clique of software developers fostered by both companies? Is there any chance this will actually effect any of us, or is this simply the Slashdot equivalent of reading People magazine?
Re:I don't think so... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:what's the big deal? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:A project going nowhere? (Score:4, Insightful)
If you aren't part of the profit, you are part of the loss. And losses get cut.
Be thankful you are working on something people believe will be profitable. Many, many things Google is looking at have almost no hope of ever seeing light of day, much less being profitable.
Re:what's the big deal? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Hand over we call it here in europe (Score:2, Insightful)
Here in The States, we legally (and spiritually) value corporations as the primary entity that produces economic value. Our laws treat a corporation much like a person.
How do we offset this seemingly overbearing allocation of power to corporations? We counter as individuals with pursuit of our self-interest: "I owe the corporation nothing." As usual, in the United States, the right of the individual reigns supreme. (You gotta love that.)
Consider that. A corporation is essentially the sum of its people's doings. But a cultural irony of the United States is that we who breathe such life into corporations deny them their most valued commitment: that of their employees. We deny them *us*.
And why, you might ask, could such a contradiction make sense?
It is because we trust neither corporations nor individuals. Both, by nature, are selfish. So we pose the two as adversaries, fodder in a competitive arena. They are merely two points of view dueling for a higher ground. From that competition of ideas (vocalized through media pronouncements and water-cooler banter) emerge various perspectives of the day. And as each of us adopts one or more of those perspectives, this informal but continuous voting process produces a seemingly nonsensical consensus that is Our View of Corporations (and Our Obligations to Corporations), for *today*.
Re:what's the big deal? (Score:3, Insightful)
Damn, if only you had made security escort her out like a criminal without dignity....absolutely nothing would have been different! You had no idea she wasn't making backups, rent-a-cops wouldn't change that. You had no idea the other admins were incompetent, rent-a-cops wouldn't change that either.
She left you a mountain of evidence against her, effectively guaranteeing she'll never work again for reasons no one can guess and were completely unreasonable. That's not really a COMMON scenario we all must prepare for in policy and SOP.
This is similar to suggesting that we need a policy to strip-search people in public for fear they might be smuggling snukes up their snizz.
Re:what's the big deal? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:what's the big deal? (Score:3, Insightful)
It doesn't work that way because I am a professional, not an hourly worker. Employers don't rent my time, they pay for my skills and work-product. I was expected to work whatever hours it took to get my projects completed, and I didn't get extra pay or overtime if I worked weekends or nights. However, with all my work finished, docking me two hours for leaving at 3pm instead of 5pm on my final day was insulting, demeaning and cheezy (not to mention illegal).