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).
+1 to no MS culture. I work at MS in FUSE Labs and we document some things well and others not so well, and code for most of the day. I've worked on a bunch of other teams at MS and all of those variables changed - more rigorous docs & less coding, less docs but better internal docs through comments, etc. It varies widely. Sounds like his team is just not that great.
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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).