Discussions

1 hour ago, vesuvius wrote

FOSS development is even more political, when they disagree, you end up with 1000 distro's, 999 of them that will never be supported.

Actually one of the greater things IMO about FOSS is if you don't like the direction something is going you can fork it, and sometimes the fork wins over the original (Linux Mint vs Ubuntu for instance). It's basically natural selection...

You can't band together and make a Windows Mint, sell/distribute it on the open market with whatever UI you want and Silverlight pre-installed and see if it can compete with Windows 8 from Microsoft. You can't legally do that with proprietary software. And even if it was legal it would be more technically difficult regardless because you don't have access to the source code...

So instead people whine endlessly about changes they don't like & theorize about how the internal bureaucracy of random proprietary vendor works on obscure community forums. It's pathetic really.

@Ray7:

I'm just going to defer to Josh on this one.

1 day ago, evildictait​or wrote

This is why if you want to make an impact on a product team, you need to learn how to phrase your request to get into the top 10% of their list of 30 awesome ideas, so that it will be implemented.

If you wrap your gem up in a toxic blanket of anti-Microsoft venom, then a PM won't waste their time trawling through your text to see if there's a gem hidden in there. They'll just straight on to the next guy in the queue to their office to give an opinion on their product.

This Microsoft development model you keep describing sounds pretty political and bureaucratic.

Translation: Ignore the ridiculous wealth that I accumulated from your achievements and breakthroughs. Especially the entire f**king airport I just bought to house my mansion-sized private jet!

I'm not sure how I could have ever learned to write a letter with him. This is the best thing ever.

Could be rewritten as "What Microsoft employees want to be unemployed?" I noticed even Ballmer refuses to answer pointed legal questions.

11 hours ago, evildictait​or wrote

*snip*

Err.. wtf? The links I posted showed large numbers of people from a wide variety of different companies being fired for posting cretinism of their employer online. In fact, my immediate thought was of the Apple guy who got canned, not the Google one who was fired. 

This is normal in the industry. Posting a beef you have with your employer online is a one-way ticket to redundancy-ville.

It seems to me that the pattern is more that you openly criticize Microsoft for something that any company would do in that situation and then point-blank ignore the fact that there are literally hundreds of other companies that do the exact same thing, including all of the other big tech companies.

This kid shouldn't be fired for disagreeing with Microsoft's policies. He shouldn't be fired for thinking that the NT kernel is slow. He should be fired because he thought the appropriate way to blow off steam about his employer was to go online and rant about his employer in a public setting.

I wasn't aware of that one (only the famous Google+ criticism guy who AFAIK, didn't get fired). It seems like Mr. Jen posted some proprietary Google financial information which could have bad regulatory consequences, and his firing was actually shocking enough that it made national news apparently. But yeah, you are right, I'll give you it.

Somewhat related, I really need to figure out how to trick you to do research for me on other topics. I've noticed that you are quite good at it. It's obvious Microsoft sucks unless you can find me a good deep learning tutorial.

5 minutes ago, Charles wrote

*snip*

Because that would be stupid. We're having an intelligent conversation here.

C

How is firing this one guy [assuming you can even find him in a non-intrusive manner] going to fix anything?

He's not the only Microsoft employee publicly shaming the company on the Internet. If the problem is Microsoft employees criticising the company in public, you have a much bigger problem on your hands then this one "junior" NT engineer. There isn't be much you can do about Microsoft employees speaking their mind if they are unhappy, short of yeah, strongly investigating a large amount of if not all of your employees and rooting them out. I mean, there is a whole lot of historic precedent for that technique. Unless you have a better idea?

Naturally though, another solution is to address the systemic things that cause employees to be unhappy in the first place (Sven's idea, not mine).

B

Why stop there? I know lets fire all the Microsoft employees talking crap on MiniMSFT's website too. Obviously to accomplish this Microsoft needs to institute a McCarthy-like investigation of all the company's employees. And any evidence of impure thoughts would result in a pink slip. Anyway I now completely understand now why he took the precautions he did. Kudos to him.

And it's incredibly valuable stuff when people on the inside post stuff like this. Channel 9 is great and all, but it is still a corporate outlet. It is always interesting to read the frank and unsanctioned opinions directly from the people in the trenches. Sometimes you can learn things that you will have a hard time learning any other way.

Web stuff is a much bigger deal to not f**k up, because so much of people's data and life is on the web.

Relevant XKCD: