Personally, I'd love to see more stuff on life in non-startups. It's good to see both, and there's a lot of stuff about startups here (understandably), so getting some other posts to balance it would be great IMHO.
> (Most) Screw ups are OK
Red Whittaker once told me "people remember you for your successes, not for your failures." People remember Paul McCartney as a member of the Beatles, and maybe a little for Wings, but not for any of the crap he's put out. They remember a director's good movies, not the bombs (unless they're really spectacular, of course.)
You caught my attention with that one: it sounded like a cuckoo quote. I don't think of Wittgenstein and silliness as exactly hanging out together. However, it turns out to be genuine and there's a related one to boot:
Never stay up on the barren heights of cleverness, but come down into the green valleys of silliness.
This is by far the most important thing I've learned in my big company life. If you are in a meeting of 10 people and somebody appears to be saying something insane or stupid, the reason nobody is saying anything is because there are 8 other people in the room who are all nodding uncertainly and they don't want to sound like the jackass.
So ask the question. At worst, you will have misunderstood what they're saying, and since it's unlikely that you are the dumbest person in the room, there's probably at least one other person who has the same misunderstanding as you.
At best, you're the guy who has spotted the flaw in the plan and spoken up before it was too late. Either way, it's a win-win for you.
Back when I used to work with Sriram on Microsoft Popfly (now defunct) I was a huge believer in asking 'stupid' questions. No matter how dumb or obvious your question might be, odds are someone else in the room has the same one. Plus, admitting that you don't know everything pays its own dividends in terms of not seeming like a total jerk.
You're absolutely right. There really isn't a stupid question. Only fearful meeting participants.
Sounds like he had a good manager. You've heard the saying:
Give the employee only enough rope to hang himself, but not enough rope that he can hang the company. I've learned far more from my failures than successes and your ability to recover from a failure shows even more than either the success or the failure.
I've had many - some good and some not so good (my current one is one of the best I've had).
The best ones typically trust me to do my job well and would back me up if I got into trouble. They also assumed that I screwed up and they needed to know about it, I would let them know first.
I have to say, that after 3 years in the corporate world, I've come to realise many of the same things and I think if I were to write a blog post on the same subject, I would make many of the exact same suggestions.
However, it's one thing to read this article and think about how to improve yourself and your life at work but how do you go about improving others and the way they work? Sriram mentions is that the people you work with is much more important than the work itself. If your team-mate is reluctant to go out of his comfort zone, or thinks so much of himself as to brush off other people's requests for help, what would you do? Email the team a link to this article? Or jump ship to another team?
I'm a big believer in constant self improvement, but unless you're very lucky to be in a team wholly of smart, friendly people, improving others is surely the only way to a happy, productive team.
PS: Does this mean I'm turning into a manager? I hope not... :p
How common is that at Microsoft? My perception is that few Microsoft employees participate in projects not directly related to their work, even if it's Microsoft technology. Take for example F#. I haven't seen much from Microsoft employees other than from the F# team (who do a great job) and (paid) evangelists.
If it's Microsoft technology, people do try out things (it is hard to avoid it - dogfooding is a big part of MSFT culture. What they don't do as much is talk about it in public or share the code out (it typically lives on some internal site). Look at people trying out Silverlight or VS 2010 or .NET 4 for example.
When playing with non-Microsoft tech, people are much quieter. There are too many people who would love nothing more than to say "Look there - a Microsoft employee using an iPhone/Google/Linux/whatever" and cause a few headaches. The truth is that a lot of Microsoft employees are just plain geeks who like to try out things.
Dogfooding is a way of life at Microsoft. Sometimes to very painful degrees. We've been using Exchange 14 as our one and only email server solution for quite a while, and yes it has gone down a fair amount and cost a ton of productivity, but it also gave the Exchange team invaluable feedback. I've also got some very painful personal experiences of dogfooding Team Foundation Server in its early days. It's not like we can say "eh this early build sucks, let's go back to X for now", because there is no X, it's been completely removed. The dogfooding is hardcore on purpose.
But the "MS employee using non-MS tech" myth is really a myth. At least nowadays it is. MS employees will and do use anything and everything. As a simple example, I personally know at least 20 MS employees with iPhones (including myself). We also have no problem pointing out to teams when their competitors are better (there are certain teams at MS that really get a whipping, from both the public and the rest of MS, I don't envy them at all.)
I went pretty far (for me, anyway) into the Microsoft bubble last month when I did a small demo as part of a PDC keynote and I noticed that there is a love that dare not speak its name, and that name is iPhone.
I met one guy who would use an old crappy phone during the day and swap sim cards into his iPhone when he knew nobody was around. Another guy wanted to snap a picture of something and send it to me, but was hesitant to take his iPhone out of his pocket, not knowing who might be around to see him using it.
I'm sure some of it is joking, some of it is half-joking, but there is some anxiety around being seen internally using a competitor's winning product.
The funny thing about Microsoft is it has always looked to me like a great environment for a developer to enjoy his work and life. It seems like a good place to have a career.
But at the same time... I would almost never use any Microsoft products. So I have this weird schizophrenic attitude towards them.
The only MS products I can stomach using is Word and the XBOX. Everything else is yucky compared to the competitors. It makes me wonder how the Microsoft devs can stand it.
>I wonder what happens if Steve Jobs catches you with a Zune at Apple? My guess is, nothing.
Really? The impression I've got from Apple employees I've met is that there would be quite a reaction indeed.
BTW, I worked at MSFT last summer and everyone seemed to have an iPhone. A lot of people used Firefox as their primary browser, and I used Opera. There was nothing impolitic about it. In fact, the only time people mentioned it was to ask me what browser I was using, if Opera's visual tabs caught their eye.
From what what I know about both companies, Steve Jobs' reaction would be much more severe than MS management. Apple doesn't seem to tolerate "different" much - it's either the Apple way or the highway.
His reaction would be severe if you tried to pitch a Zune at him. I don't think he'd feel threatened by seeing an employee using one, the way Ballmer clearly is when he catches somebody with an iPod.
"Hey, I know neither of these guys, have never met either of them, and wasn't actually at the event where the infamous 'Ballmer mocks iPhone guy' incident happened, but clearly Ballmer is threatened and Jobs isn't!"
Plenty of Microsoft employees have iPhones. Microsoft makes several iPhone apps. I know several people whose work laptop is a Mac (usually running Windows). And--as you might expect at any good technology company--Microsoft employees are some of the first to try out any new software or gadget.
Ballmer feeling 'threatened' by the fact that an employee is using a non-Microsoft product? Don't be silly.
You know how they say, "anything you say can and will be used against you"? Lawsuits are like that too. Often it's better to say nothing than something that can be used out of context in court.
The more people that are given information relevant to a lawsuit, for example, the more people and documents that can potentially be subpoenaed. Even if the information itself is harmless, this could add substantial expense and hassle.
> (Most) Screw ups are OK
Red Whittaker once told me "people remember you for your successes, not for your failures." People remember Paul McCartney as a member of the Beatles, and maybe a little for Wings, but not for any of the crap he's put out. They remember a director's good movies, not the bombs (unless they're really spectacular, of course.)