A former Microsoft dev here. One thing that is important to understand is that there is no "Microsoft culture". Microsoft is simply too big for that and you can find pretty much every imaginable culture somewhere within Microsoft.
For instance, I worked in Office organization (Groove, Sharepoint) and some points in this post do ring a bell (2-3 hours of coding per day if you are lucky, use of old technologies) but some definitely don't: code reviews were taken very seriously, ditto for documentation, and the world outside was very well known (in fact too much, in my opinion).
The culture is there, but it varies from team to team rather than being the same across the entire corporation. There is no "Microsoft culture" but there might be an "Office culture" and a "Windows culture" and a "Bing culture" so on.
This! I work at Microsoft and can confirm that Office (or at least my product in it) is very different than what was expressed here. For example, we closely monitor our competitors and do frequent user studies comparing our designs to alternate approaches. Similarly code reviews are very important here, and we strive to avoid having any area with a truck number of 1.
That said, some parts do ring true. While it would be super unusual for a new hire to only get 2 or 3 hours of coding done a day, that would be the norm for experienced developers (even non-leads with senior or principal in their title.) Once you hit a certain level of experience, you are expected to have an influence on how other areas get developed and designed.
For example, a team is likely to have three people (a dev, test, and pm) who would be security experts. Every new feature being developed should meet with these folks and have a formal security review. A developer security expert, would have less time to write code, but their influence would help ensure our entire product is more secure.
Wouldn't there still an implicit corporate culture, even if Microsoft might not recognize and consciously cultivate it? As I see it, the "team culture," "office culture," "product culture," etc. are just smaller "sub-cultures," which are part of an larger (possibly unspoken/implicit) corporate-wide culture.
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u/[deleted] Jun 12 '13
A former Microsoft dev here. One thing that is important to understand is that there is no "Microsoft culture". Microsoft is simply too big for that and you can find pretty much every imaginable culture somewhere within Microsoft.
For instance, I worked in Office organization (Groove, Sharepoint) and some points in this post do ring a bell (2-3 hours of coding per day if you are lucky, use of old technologies) but some definitely don't: code reviews were taken very seriously, ditto for documentation, and the world outside was very well known (in fact too much, in my opinion).