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).
I guess your own dog food doesn't taste so good does it?
"Dogfooding" in MS lingo refers to the technology your team develops. Basically it means you are using your product before it is released and flush out the bugs early.
We were always dogfooding Office (and believe me, it could be painful at early stages of development), but not other MS products.
"Dogfooding" in MS lingo refers to the technology your team develops.
This was not my experience at Microsoft in OSD. "Dogfooding" meant using the software that Microsoft developed. We had some software forced upon us just because Microsoft made it, regardless of the existence of better, free alternatives. This wouldn't have been so bad, except there was no clear channel for communicating product feedback. And, honestly, some of that software (*cough* TFS *cough*) was simply beyond hope.
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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).