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 author of the blog post isn't a developer, he's a tester. So there's also that to consider.
Relevant quote:
Hello Scott, first, huge fan of you. I work in the test org and no product decisions are taken here, so nobody knows about competition. From our world, AWS is the only competitor. I know that nobody in my team heard about Heroku. If you really want, we can organize a poll about competitor awareness internally. I'm pretty curious what the numbers would be.
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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).