58 minutes ago, brian.​shapiro wrote

@Bas:

*snip*

What are you going to do to enjoy your time? Post on Channel9? Play Angry Birds? My larger point was what most people would do to pass time in a car ride is just as much a waste of time as driving -- although some people would use it productively. 

Don't make me get all existentialist.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Relevant XKCD:

6 hours ago, evildictait​or wrote

The employee was absolutely right to be scared shitless. If Microsoft finds out who posted it, they're going to get fired.

That's not to say he doesn't have some valid points. Indeed, I can identify with several of the points he's making (teams really hate "inheriting" code that they didn't write, and it's much easier to write new code than repair old code, for instance).

But the reason he's gonna get fired when they find out who it is isn't because he's making these points, but because of how he's making these points.

If you have a problem with your employer, talk to your boss. If your boss doesn't listen, talk to his boss. If he doesn't listen, write your CV and go somewhere where your talents will be appreciated.

Writing a negative post about your employer online on a site that you know is going to use it as ammunition against your and your colleagues is always going to get you fired when they find out. That's not just "how Microsoft works". That's how every company in America works.

If you read what this guy is saying, more then just technical criticism of NT, he is saying that NT's problems come from the fact that Microsoft is so rotten from the inside that internal criticism probably wouldn't be productive. I've read MiniMSFT quite a lot and it's obvious he's not the only Microsoft employee that feels that way.

But I'm sensing a pattern here. I point out something horrible, you say "the rest of the tech industry is like this". But, it's always easy to use Google as a counterexample. The famous Google criticism guy cbae mentioned even used his real name. And IIRC was never fired and even said that it would be ridiculous for a company like Google to fire an employee over public criticism, because the company is better then that.

I''m really not personally trying to even promote Google in any way.. but they somehow just keep proving over and over much better they are then the rest of tech industry when it comes to stuff like this. Maybe that's also why they have been consistently rated a much better place to work for then Microsoft and why the guy complains that Google is hiring away all of Microsoft's best talent.

4 minutes ago, fanbaby wrote

*snip*

Bass, time to go to sleep, or to go to work, or something 

This is not you

You are witnessing what happens when you are up late & concurrently reading machine learning literature and arguing on Channel 9 at the same time.

15 minutes ago, cbae wrote

My using Hyper-V is mainly out of convenience. I have immediate access to it, and I didn't have to go hunting for it or register or figure out which version to download. The setup process of the host OS is something I'm very familiar with--it's really a stripped down build of Windows Server--so I didn't have to read any documentation for installation. Plus, the client management software is built into Windows 8--I didn't have to install a thing on my PC to manage the VMs remotely.

Any advanced capability of the host OS isn't all that big a concern since my VMs don't run in a production environment.

IC. So it is a familiarity/comfort zone thing. For that sort of thing I'd recommend chilling on a white sandy beach with a collection of different flavored margaritas close by. That's the type of convenience I can get behind.

But prioritizing convenience as a technologist? Please no. Witness all the thousands of threads on Channel 9 complaining about various changes in Microsoft's technical direction. Is this productive? Hmm? Well, that's what happens when people prioritize familiarity/convenience over technical advancement.

I recommend VMWare's stuff personally. Guest 3D acceleration (practically required these days) and Unity mode [warning: mute speakers] as well as being able to automate Linux guest installation based before it even boots the ISO are big boons to Linux guests..

3 hours ago, cbae wrote

I have a box running Hyper-V onto which I can set up a Linux VM whenever I want.

Just as I was about to post a thoughtful reply addressing your post I suddenly caught on to this. I read it a few times, forming bigrams and trigrams with the sentences around it, trying to find any sense of self-referential irony. But I couldn't find any.

I begin trying to establish a decision tree of some sort that from your perspective would end up with running Linux on Hyper-V given a feature vector of known inputs. But I couldn't find any.

Why is this relevant? The situation is that these perplexity surrounding this statement especially, but not exclusively when taken in combination to the rest of your post has me lose the will to reply to your points. I am very sorry cbae and wish you well with your future efforts.

38 seconds ago, fanbaby wrote

*snip*

The list of RoR-inspired tools is quite long... I wouldn't hold that against MS

Not holding it against them, just explaining its origins. Since there are apparently people who develop on Microsoft platforms that don't know what POSIX is, I figured they probably wouldn't know what RoR is either. So maybe worth mentioning at least so that it can get google'ed and promptly dismissed.

18 minutes ago, fanbaby wrote

*snip*

These tools (yeoman and grunt and sass and haml etc.) are build tools. They are important. If it was 90's, Microsoft would have created nyeoman, ngrunt, nsass and nhaml

True in many cases. I would say ASP.NET MVC was a response to the exploding popularity of MVC design in stuff like Struts, RoR, and Django. NuGet capability was in Java for years as Maven.. And there is something just amusing about Microsoft increasingly adopting the source control system built by one of their most bitter competitors.

Although to be fair the copying goes both ways, Java generics was a half-assed response to C# getting generics IMO. Ever since Microsoft hired Anders, languages has been one of their greater strengths.

13 hours ago, Ray7 wrote

*snip*

That's a very convenient rationalization. What it's actually called is being a Grade-A hypocrite.

http://www.fosspatents.com/2013/05/preliminary-eu-ruling-finds-googles.html

 

Hmmm sorry, but I got no problems with patents being used defensively in these patent wars. Keep digging for stuff though.

27 seconds ago, evildictait​or wrote

*snip*

??

*snip*

America has never really "done" unions. But then again, this isn't really a Microsoft problem. Microsoft employees can join a union if they want to. There's no part of the FTE contract that forbids it. Indeed, it would be against the law for Microsoft to try and prohibit it.

I suspect that the reason most Microsoft employees aren't unionized is because they don't want to be unionized. Hell, if MS is giving you a bad deal, it's not hard for most MS employees to find a different job elsewhere.

The movie industry is incredibly unionized. And moral rights especially are important to the various film based unions. You might even see the unions themselves listed in the film credits if you look hard enough.

Very few people except those into BSDM or whatever are into being exploited. As I said before: "I don't think most engineers at these big for-profit tech companies people realize how much they are exploited on a day to day basis by their employers." I appreciate that the tech workers are one of the highest paid affecting this. But times change and sh!t will hit the fan eventually, and there will be a collective wake up to the fact that they've spent their entire lives being bamboozled for their talents by the modern equivalent of robber barons. At least that's how it usually turns out.

1 minute ago, evildictait​or wrote

*snip*

And yet Google, Microsoft and Apple have no shortage of first-rate engineers queuing literally around the block, fighting each other to get a job there.

Not according to what they keep telling Congress.

Perhaps that's because most employees making $900,000+ a year for a $100,000 salary couldn't make anywhere close to $900,000 if they were working anywhere other than a big corporate. Or maybe it's because they value something else. Or who knows.

Anyway, it's a bit of a moot point, given how your company gives you a 50/50 split on your $900,000+ patents. You'd struggle to make that kind of cash at Microsoft until you at least make partner principle, and they teach you the secret handshake that you need to know to visit the vault of gold where the lawyers go in the evenings to laugh about poor people and how Microsoft have "done it again".

So basically you are saying exploitation is okay as long as you get away with it?

I blame it on the lack of unions. Early on in the history of other creative industries they suffered the same problems until they unionized.

3 minutes ago, evildictait​or wrote

 

And no offense, but Twitter and (and probably whatever company you work for) are small fry when it comes to patents and patent wars and it doesn't have any full time employees paid to do nothing but research, unlike Google, Microsoft and Apple.

Haha, that's not remotely true. The only difference is we don't have to fund the flamboyant lifestyle of various billionaires & investment bankers (ie. we are non-profit), so all the revenue can go back to people who actually do the work. Funny how that works.

You think a 50/50 split would bankrupt any large tech company? Please. It wouldn't even make a dent. Look at their balance sheets and profit per employee ratio. I don't think most engineers at these big for-profit tech companies people realize how much they are exploited on a day to day basis by their employers. I don't think I can work anywhere I know my employer is making $900,000+ on me and paying me only $100,000 in return. That's feels like it almost should be considered robbery.

Yeah and I can't actually look up all the faceless engineers who contributed to this massive profit anyway. There is no credits roll in modern proprietary software, even if it would take almost no resources to do. And your boy Microsoft doesn't provide moral rights to their employees short of the bare minimum required by law. That's why you often confuse them for a borg entity. Do you ever see this happening in movies, book industries? Hell no! People keep their name and their efforts are publicly tied to their name in most intellectual pursuits. Even when a credits roll is MUCH more expensive in a movie, it's always there. But we tolerate being exploited as faceless & nameless collection of monkeys in the tech industry. It shouldn't be tolerated..

Yeah bro, Microsoft is horrible for this and many many many (many!) other reasons. A ton of the technology Microsoft """"makes"""" is interesting but you'll never catch me defending their ideologies or business.. it disgusts me in every possible way. Nothing redeeming about it.