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Comment by FlorianRappl | Hacker News Reader

I am surprised that no one mentioned Microsoft so far. These days they are professional, innovation-driven, and do not bring in much of the unnecessary cult that comes with companies like Google. They are more open than Apple.

Also from a personal experience I think their interviews / hiring methods are better than all of the other big players.

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But are their engineering practices better? They used to take test seriously, but then they fired all the testers and quality of basic things has slipped. They don't even hire for dedicated testing roles any more.

I get that devs are supposed to test their own code, but they are surprisingly bad at it overall and unit tests, despite being a great meme, just don't cut it.

Some examples of quality issues: new limit to how many items can be in the start menu. I see bugs/rendering issues in Word for the first time ever (Windows and Mac). Edge is glitch when opening/closing tabs.

That's interesting to hear because I was reading the Software Project Survival Guide and it said that, at the time, Microsoft knew the value of quality because their tester to developer ratio was 1 to 1. Higher quality code had a ratio of up to 4 testers per developer. Low quality code is usually the opposite ratio, 1 tester for every 3-4 developers.

A problem with assessing Microsoft's engineering culture and practices is that at Microsoft is there is no consistent unifying set of engineering practices. Product teams need to comply with some standard processes around security and the like, but as to how they run their teams they are allowed to chart their own course, more or less.

Microsoft is one of the few places where you can pretty much switch to using any part of your CS degree just by making an internal transfer. Operating systems? Compilers? Consumer applications? Cloud infrastructure? Search engines? Games and console development? Embedded devices? Database engines? CS research? All there in one place. Only Google and Amazon come close but Google is 90% search and ads and Amazon is 90% cloud and retailing with all other areas being small side projects for them.

The downsides are the mega-corporate culture, with all the bureaucratic dysfunction and vicious internal politics that entails (it's not quite IBM but not for lack of trying), that its famed private offices are gradually shrinking / going away, and the pay is decent but not amazing. And obviously if you rabidly dislike the MS software stack, you won't like it there.

This sounds pretty amazing. I don't particularly hate the MS stack. I like most of it, in fact. This puts it in my list of companies-to-consider list.

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