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Comment by mikestew | Hacker News Reader

Say what one will about Microsoft, I probably learned more there than anywhere else. Source control and how to branch/merge at scale. How to work cross-team relationships. How to work with people much smarter than I'll ever be. How to do a little political wrangling when necessary, and a bunch of other things I've probably forgotten.

Having worked at several small companies since, it's disappointing how often I get to watch teams find out the hard way why things are done this way, or not that way. Sure, I will point out the potential folly along the way, but few care to hear it, and instead wish to invent their very own wheel because their case requires a special kind of roundness.

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It sounds like our experiences at Microsoft could hardly have been more different. Virtually everything I learned at Microsoft could be filed under "whatever you do, no matter how desperate you are, never do it this way". The systems were unreliable, inefficient when they worked, and the number of person-hours routinely wasted on tool management was staggering. The culture was unhealthy, competitive and individualistic, sometimes to the point of hostility. You saw cross-team communication, I saw at least a quarter of every working day wasted in routine status meetings, in which two or three of the ten or twelve people present spent an hour making a couple of decisions while the rest of us tried not to look too bored...

Of course Microsoft is a big place and different divisions work differently. I'll never take the risk of landing in such a mess again, though.

> I saw at least a quarter of every working day wasted in routine status meetings, in which two or three of the ten or twelve people present spent an hour making a couple of decisions while the rest of us tried not to look too bored..

That sounds horrible. Did you mention your concerns to the people who owned those meetings, in a way that made it clear you were trying to help improve them?

I've had success several times with this in BigCo, with various satisfactory outcomes:

1. "You're right, this meeting is BS! But it has to happen for various reasons X Y Z -- since you don't care about this area you don't need to come, we'll grab you if we need you."

2. "You're right, and other people feel tuned out as well, so let's try cutting it to 10 minutes / mailing out an agenda beforehand / starting exactly on time."

3. "You're right, this is an inefficient way to gather state so we're going to just swing by each person 1-on-1."

4. "You're right, this team is too big so we're splitting in 2/3 smaller groups"

No, I never did. It just seemed to be an accepted part of the institutional culture, and I felt like fighting against it would have only made me look like a complainer. Maybe someone with more status could have tried it, but I was just a newbie and nobody seemed to care what I thought.

I think the project I worked on was worse than average because it was the sort of cross-cutting change that affected a lot of different teams - six different products, I think? There were a lot of PMs involved.

I'd just like to add that pointing out seemingly mundane things like these are what allowed me to move from engineering into the consulting team at my company (which is what I wanted).

It's worth testing the waters a few times. You'll know pretty quickly if they value your input, and if not you can decide if you want to continue working for them.

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