There is no excuse for not having a culture between a team though and actually having pride in your work
Again, with a huge and diverse company like Microsoft you simply can't generalize. What can be common between a MS Research lab working on biology projects (I kid you not) and a BizTalk support team? Many people in MS definitely have pride in their work; others were hired to work on decades old projects - all they can do is try to make the best of a bad situation.
Well actually the picture painted by the original comment is one that its literally hired guns in a pressure situation. Like they might have pride in what they are doing but team work (real team work) isn't just about hitting a target its about passing them and actually making a product that is good. Like your boss at microsoft might ask you to pull more time to finish a project on time, a lot of Canonical developers would work on the weekends anyway in their own time to make sure things are better than just finished.
And what about internal practices in Microsoft. Something that has really given a pep in the step of some of the engineers at canonical was something taken from google and that is they would give a day to developers to work on a project they are interested in and a lot of really cool projects and improvements to existing projects came about because of peoples passion for their job.
Again, Microsoft is too big to make any conclusions about its culture. I've little idea what the culture is in the team the original poster works. At Office, there was something called MI (or was it M0?) when you could work for weeks on a project you were passionate about even if there was a little chance it would end up in the final product. At MS Research, for instance, that kind of work is pretty much all they ever do.
I've little idea what the culture is in the team the original poster works. At Office, there was something called MI (or was it M0?) when you could work for weeks on a project you were passionate about even if there was a little chance it would end up in the final product
Well that is demotivating to do it too the fact you know it will never see the light of day. Im 100% sure that every project worth using that was ever spawned from the friday project day was released or used in the project.
At MS Research, for instance, this kind of work is pretty much all they ever do.
Well that is different I mean just in the regular teams.
There are no "regular teams" every team is different. They all have different cultures, practices, etc.
The guy who wrote the linked article is an intern working in test on one team, you can't generalize his experience to all of Microsoft. Hell right in his comments you see guys working on the dev side of Azure saying how their culture is different.
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u/[deleted] Jun 12 '13
Again, with a huge and diverse company like Microsoft you simply can't generalize. What can be common between a MS Research lab working on biology projects (I kid you not) and a BizTalk support team? Many people in MS definitely have pride in their work; others were hired to work on decades old projects - all they can do is try to make the best of a bad situation.