Working at Microsoft
What’s the culture at MS for an SDE? Since MSFT has its own tech stack, I believe there’s no open source tool encouragement. And considering there’s a big community out there for open source, how does MSFT technologies compare? Do I stand a better chance of getting into good company after working for Microsoft?
There’s tons of open source based tooling inside now, and a lot of pretty good internal tools too. The knowledge of these tools does not make one a better engineer in a fundamental sense, unless the tools are so bad and impact productivity significantly.
Agree. It’s the domain and understanding what things fits in well and why.
I worked at Microsoft for years up till about a decade ago and I still miss the more integrated tooling compared to the open source stacks I’ve dealt with since. There is significant value in a relatively coherent design strategy from a company with a history of producing a whole platform worth of dev tools, and with deep historical experience.
This. I would stay at MS because of, not despite, our tech stack.
In 2016, microsoft was the company with the biggest open source contributions: https://octoverse.github.com/2016/. Some of the more recent open source projects released include vs code and react xp. I agree that many teams still work in Microsoft enterprise languages, but Microsoft does have open source projects
Tech stack? Oh yeah. Prepare to eat shit with CoreXT, BuildTracker and other internal garbage. Most of engineers are retarded enough to not know how to create account on GitHub.
Half of Google, Facebook, Amazon, Twitter, Uber and Snapshot in Seattle are ex MSFT employees. So, your chances of getting into a good company is quite high. MS is a great company to work for as well (i worked there for 11 years).
That’s a crisp answer, thank you. Looking forward to the experience at MSFT.
If you can, join to Azure. By far the best org in terms of work and growth opportunities. MS is a large large company - if you end up reporting to a manager that you don't enjoy working for or you don't see good growth and learning opportunities, leave asap. Moving within MS is as easy as it gets. Dont waste precious time in stagnant areas.