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Comment by grepfru_it | Hacker News Reader

All my life I wanted to work at Microsoft. I read a book in 91 about Bill Gates and how he hacked DOS together and the introduction of Windows. I was just a kid but I was dead set on following his footsteps. Well after several rejections throughout my career, I finally got into Microsoft via acquisition. Started working my way into the Microsoft org and met some horribly, horribly biased individuals and managers. One team I encountered expected 60 hour weeks to be the norm, prioritized metrics over delivering features, and treated me as an outsider. Completely opened my eyes to how Microsoft was so ruthless over the past 3 decades and immediately made me nope out of there.

Someone on HN said it best: don’t meet your idols. (FWIW another person told me their team wasn’t so toxic, but the damage has been done)

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Perhaps a better lesson we all can learn from should be “don’t idolize” rather than “don’t meet your idols”. Learn from the good and the bad and grow from the experience.

Reminds me of the famous quote from The Dark Knight, “You either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain”. No one, companies included, is perfect. You stick around long enough, you’ll find the bad.

There are other ways to reach one's goals or dreams, but at least for GP's case it seems the "idolization" of Bill Gates and Microsoft has motivated them to work hard and improvement themselves to the point that they could eventually get hired by Microsoft.

One counter saying that it's not a worthwhile goal... but I'd say that every goal , worthwhile or not, requires a certain level of rose-tinted glasses anyway.

I've learned to take anecdotes as data points but also recognize that in a large enough company, there is a huge variance.

A large company is like a country. Different people will have different experiences. Take America for instance. Some people say America sucks, the healthcare is broken, there's too many guns, Europe is better. Others say there's more jobs that pay better in America, America gives people a chance to be on the leading edge (through various tech/cultural hubs) and to do something that would never be possible in their own country.

A company -- like America -- is a bunch of people united by a set of constraints. If you don't like those constraints, then it's worst place in the world. But if you like those constraints, it's not bad.

The former group though tends to be more vocal about it. This is why I discount HN opinions that are super emotional and embellished and one-sided. Chances are OP had a really bad experience and the sample is really biased.

Not sure when you got there but all these companies are so big now that the local management is basically the separator between good and bad and toxic and fulfilling. Sounds like you got a terrible team, and as an acquihire were othered from the beginning.

> I read a book in 91 about Bill Gates and how he hacked DOS together

Book of fiction then. They bought DOS, and actually had to get a contractor(Tim Paterson from SCP) to come in to port it to the IBM PC.

> I was dead set on following his footsteps

Decades later you haven't realized that what Bill Gates did was found a startup instead of working for IBM at the time, the current day Microsoft equivalent?

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