OT: Crazy Programming

[David LeBlanc]

You're pretty much correct. For years Microsoft hired mainly (>90%) recent
college graduates to fill in the trenches and the balance where the
experienced cadre that, in theory, guided them. College grads are cheap,
idealistic enough to work for about half what their peers make for the
prestiege of working at MS and do it for 70-80 hours a week for 5 years.
They also had the right "make my mark on the world and I can do anything
better then what's come before" (aka "not invented here")

Times have changed though. When I contracted at MS again last year, I was
struck by how things had changed. There where far fewer offices that looked
like recreations of a dorm room or some "Dungeons and Dragons" fantasy
(still a fair amount of "6 computers and 8 monitors" hardware geeks around
though - amount of hardware in one's office is an internal prestige/power
thing), people where generally older (in their 30's now!), a _lot_ of
offspring came to the Holloween Party and the building generally got pretty
quiet by 6 PM. Still a lot of Microsoft "culture" around, but nothing like
my first stint at MS in '96.

David LeBlanc
Seattle, WA USA

> -----Original Message-----
> From: python-list-admin at python.org
> [mailto:python-list-admin at python.org]On Behalf Of Steve Holden
> Sent: Sunday, May 19, 2002 12:08
> To: python-list at python.org
> Subject: Re: OT: Crazy Programming
>
<snip>
> This hasn't stopped some pretty baroque architectures being designed for
> software systems. In my experience, the more baroque the architecture the
> less experienced the designer (which is why I sometimes
> disparagingly refer
> to microsoft systems as being written by recent graduates. We all have to
> learn somehow ;-)
>
> regards
>  Steve
> --
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> Steve Holden                                 http://www.holdenweb.com/
> Python Web Programming                http://pydish.holdenweb.com/pwp/
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