Corporate stereotypes, and why Microsoft could kill your startup career

Interestingly enough, the same can apply to non-engineers as well. The skills that help you have a successful career at Microsoft are very different than the skills it takes to get things done when you don’t have an Empire behind you.

The track record of ex-MSFT ventures is decidedly mixed. PayPal, for example, has a much better record.

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I agree with the gist of your article; large corporations have very specialized jobs and it’s important for an engineer to not over-specialize and be aware of the world outside that specific niche. Keeping a more diverse skill set up-to-date improves chances of getting work somewhere else. You know that will be need some day.

But this sentence is really offensive to me: “Outside of Facebook, Asperger’s Syndrome is not thought of as an asset”. Asperger’s syndrome is not considered an “asset” anywhere. It is a syndrome that is very hard to live with, no one choses to have it, and no one is proud of having it. It’s also not curable. Please don’t use it as a metaphor for people’s attitutes you don’t like.

For what it is worth, your characterization of Facebook engineers is way off. I’m not sure which subset of engineers you interacted with but it is clear to me that you have not met a representative sample. You acknowledge it is a stereotype, of course, but you claim it embodies the culture and you could not be more wrong. I’ve been an engineer at Facebook for over 5 years and one of the things that has always struck me about the place is actually how outgoing and friendly my coworkers are relative to the median engineering population. I was at Microsoft before this so I have some other professional experience to compare with. I have also kept track of classmates of mine from Harvard who are at Google and other startups which gives me more confidence in my claims. Your assertion that we don’t have many risk takers is probably the most absurd thing about this — even just tracking the change in our product should make that clear, though we make changes to infrastructure on the same order of risk quite often. Your claim that we would shy away from hard code problems is likewise unfounded, though unfortunately so is your claim about writing beautiful code since we tend to be much more pragmatic.

In particular, if you are talking about candidates who are ex-employees of these companies to interview with you, you must recognize you are victim to a substantial selection bias in your sample set. These are people who did not fit in, did not like, or did not succeed at the company they left. They might be as indicative of what a culture is NOT like as they are what it IS like.

While I like a lot of your ideas here your comments on Asperger’s Syndrome and autism imply that you discriminate against people with these conditions when hiring. From what I’ve read it’s my understanding that these are legally protected conditions.

Very interesting article!

Hi! I like and agree with your post. I wrote largely the same thing on my blog, except generalized to the stereotype of “.NET developers” rather than “large companies” (eg, Microsoft, Facebook, Google). I think your post is better than mine, but you can read it here if you’re curious:

http://blog.expensify.com/2011/03/25/ceo-friday-why-we-dont-hire-net-programmers/

Thanks for writing!

-david (http://twitter.com/expensify)

This is very well written and dead on. While the post over on expensify implies that .NET developers are just plain bad a programming, this article nails the actual issue, which is culture.

As a developer who has been working in both PHP and .NET for several years, I can say that the .NET guys I know tend to be better programmers, but also tend to be more set in their ways. In my experience, the average PHP developer is focused on getting something built and making it cool, while average .NET developer is more focused on architecture and scalability.

Most startups are looking to get a product or service to market quickly, which is a goal that fits best with the PHP/Ruby mindset. More mature start-ups and software companies are looking to make their apps more stable and scalable, which is why you see companies like Google and Facebook transition from developer cultures to engineering cultures.

Nothing exemplifies this more than the popular MVC frameworks for the various platforms. Ruby on Rails tutorials and documentation focus on rapid development and convention over configuration. ASP.NET MVC resources focus on OOP best practices and scalability.

The biggest problem with this division of culture is that a healthy, innovative software company could benefit from a balance of developers and engineers. Most start-ups could use a couple hardcore engineers and every big company I’ve send desperately needs people that can be creative and build quick prototypes.

[...] something like PHP/Rails/Node.js. Indeed some have gone as far as to say that .NET development is black mark against you, only serving to limit your job prospects: Programming with .NET is like cooking in a [...]

[...] edit: Skip my post and read this one instead.  It says the same thing, but less offensively.  (Or, rather, more offensively to Facebook and [...]

Got here thanks to David Barrett’s rant against .NET developers which made the news recently.

One thing I’d be interested in understanding is how the people reflect on the companies. I understand that the impressions above are from people you interviewed (although this is only specifically mentioned for Facebook), which means that these are people no longer working at these companies. They were either fired or left. Looks to me like this fact should affect the conclusion drawn about these companies (although it probably does say something about their hiring process).

By the way, I’ve worked at many startups, and they all used Windows for development. I don’t know what experience you have, but you shouldn’t translate it into a rule.

Rereading, I guess the comment about Windows and startups should be taken in the context of web startups only. It might be truer there.

BTW, I think your comments about Google are wrong at several levels. Maybe I’ll comment about it later.

[...] * Did the Microsoft stack kill MySpace?* Why we don’t hire .net programmers* Why Microsoft could kill your startup career [...]

By way of context, it seems that many startups get founded while their founders are doing something “normal” (say, a corporate job or going to college).

Would you say that running one’s own small organization (business/startup/non-profit-org/[insert buzzword here]) on the side would also be a sufficient antidote to the danger of losing the ability to run a startup full-time down the road?

To extend the question further, are the skills related to running a startup largely specific to the type of tiny organization you’re running? For example, if you start a little company selling bricks, would a future startup based on selling flowers benefit?

On a different note, your post appears to advise people to avoid only knowing people who are like yourself and foreclosing options but some have argued that the latter (foreclosing options) bit is not such a bad thing. Indeed, a pessimist might ask you if you ever wonder about how running SpeakerText may have made you unemployable by the corporate world.

Hi,

I really don’t understand what is a corporate supposed to do to get it right. Google makes it comfortable. Facebook doesn’t take any risks. Microsoft, well I just got your opinion on Microsoft.

What is your startup offering that is more exiting then what Microsoft, Google and Facebook ? Technologically and programatically all these companies face real challenges. Of course working on them is challenging and exiting, what is wrong with that ?

Maybe I lack the experience but I am frustrated cause I spend 10 minutes of my time reading this, cause it was posted on dzone, and really this article is very arrogant.

Sorry, i would not apply at your company. I already feel you would ask your engineers to work 80 hrs week, as a way to prove to you their innovative spirit.

I wish I read more about how your startup faces more exiting challenges and how different it is from the culture of Facebook, Google or Microsoft. :\

Interesting viewpoint. As someone who’s worked at both startups and Microsoft, you’re incorrect, but all are entitled to their own opinion.

Also, you have several grammatic errors in your text. Perhaps you could fire up Microsoft Word and use the spell-check and grammar features. It’s all the rave among professional companies these days – even startups.

Hey Matt, you come off sounding like a jerk. Good luck.

Matt,
Interesting article, and you’re exactly right in my estimation. I’ve developed in .NET for the last 9 years. I started my new job with a startup yesterday…as a LAMP developer. I dont think I would have been let in the door if not for personal and prior professional relationships with several folks already here. I gave up a cushy,safe job precisely to escape the slow rust and atrophy you describe. (I only had to convince my wife that I wasn’t crazy and this would be a wise move in the long run.)
Regards,
Michael Caldwell

[...] http://mattswanson.org/corporate-stereotypes-and-why-microsoft-could-kill-your-startup-career/ [...]

Matt — interesting perspective, even in spite of the generalizations.

I have worked with and programmed on every OS: Windows, Linux variants, Mac OS and mobile platforms as well: Android, iOS, Windows Phone 7. I have worked in a startup (Goowy Media, aq. by AOL), and we actually used the .NET stack, which seemed to actually function pretty well but I was just a front-end engineer doing Flash at that point (two proprietary technologies – argh!). But really it was not bad – Flash and .NET both did everything we needed them to, we did not run into any major problems I can recall. That was back in 2006. Since then, the open-source options have come a long way thanks in part to big companies like Google and Apple adopting OSS.

Proprietary tech has plenty of flaws, but so do non-proprietary solutions. Windows is used by roughly 95 percent of the world (I don’t know what the exact percentage is at this point, probably a bit lower). Say what you will about Windows, but these are the facts:

Windows is the most secure operating system. Ask any cracker. It also has the most viruses targeting it due to its market share, but at the same time it is battle-hardened by all of the security vulnerabilities that it has had exposed over time.

Windows has the widest hardware support – if a driver exists for something, it will exist on Windows before any other platform (unless it is for a mobile device).

Windows has the most software available for it, and it can pretty easily run OSS – natively or through a virtual console.

I have a Mac and a PC running Windows. I use my Mac only when necessary, usually to develop iOS applications. My PC used to dual-boot Ubuntu but I got to a point where I was tired of dealing with inferior driver support and wiped it.

I now use Windows with MS Visual Studio – which works great for developing 3D applications with DirectX, which I do a lot of, I have no complaints there. I worked for a long time with OpenGL, and the development process was filled with various headaches that I don’t care to deal with (not worth an extra 5 percent market share). Even John Carmack now admits that DirectX has surpassed OpenGL. I hate proprietary tech myself, but if it works and there isn’t a better option I will readily use it. Sometimes I use Eclipse for other things but prefer to use Visual Studio when I can. Note, this is coming from someone who has fairly extensively worked with almost every language and development environment out there.

I think that ultimately it boils down to user preference and what your target market is. Not everyone is developing web applications, so you have to keep that in mind. I am building a startup, and we have little to no interest in web applications (we are working on 3D rendering stuff, which benefits the most from native client speeds and unabstracted hardware interfacing).

One last remark — you say:

“When a company openly dismisses the value of designers and business analysts, you end up with Google Wave.”

I think that designers and business analysts have relatively little value when it comes to software. I have worked on everything from front-end design to back-end server interaction. Designers are a dime a dozen, and many coders are also competent designers – personally I would never hire someone who was just a designer – if they know how to code than they can much more rapidly prototype and automate various designs. In spite of no formal training in design, I can easily reproduce any of the best-designed websites (or competently design passable solutions myself). And business analysts – don’t get me started. Did microsoft need a business analyst? Facebook? Apple? Google? Amazon? Sure, maybe when they grew into behemoths and had money to waste, but never in their infancy, when they were considered to be startups. Google Wave is what happens when your engineers have to build stupid ideas that middle-management comes up with. In any lean startup, engineers are the only required role. Ideally, you should have (some) engineers with skills other than programming, namely in design.

How do I set engineering goals for myself?…

Invest in your knowledge portfolio. There are many types of engineering goals, but I’d say that learning is the easiest and most effective goal of all to achieve. Here I’ll list some things that help you set concrete goals in learning. In Hunt and Th…

You’re right. It’s all about entrepreneurs. My eyes have been opened.
Entrepreneurs entrepreneurs entrepreneurs entrepreneurs!

You’re an idiot that knows little about business!

We’re all in this to make money, right?! It is money that drives choices so you choose to use different languagues, frameworks, tools, OS, because of COST. That’s what it is all about.

You can spin it the way you want and blame big corporations for all sort of things BUT at the end of the day you have to make choices and those choices come down to saving MONEY!

Idunno … have you ever considered that some people actually love doing engineering work, and would hate to deal with all the non-technical aspects of a startup? For such people Google for instance is a very nice place to work – if you’re capable, you can always switch projects and sites, in order not to get rusty.

OTOH, probably more so for really savvy engineers than for average programmers, startups are a heartache. You are usually working under constraints which often impede on quality. You need to compromise every second step, between features, costs and duration. You do overtime to keep up your tight schedule, and there’s no time for research and learning. You can’t really afford the best programmers there are on the market, also due to costs. To somebody technically minded, not really caring about the entrepreneurial aspects, a startup is in no way a pleasant place to work.

To clarify, the majority of the people I spoke with had current jobs but were looking for new opportunities. It is quite common for people in silicon valley to willingly leave their company for a new more exciting opportunity.

I think running a startup on the side, no matter how big, is extremely valuable experience.

To your second point, I am absolutely unemployable by the corporate world

good read, and interesting to say the least. …def interested in hearing more about your definition of an “engineer”.

I’d just like to say that as someone who is going through different programming languages trying to find one that seems to fit, your article was very inspiring. I wondered why everytime I tried learning C# etc I just couldn’t go through with it. So at the moment I’m learning Ruby, going on to the RoR framework, then going to brush up my html5, javascript and eventually some C skills to top it all off. Then probably see what else I can do to make me irresistable to employers, find time for some MySQL stuff as well I suppose.

You carry on annoying people by telling the truth.

Take away my .NET and you will get no actual productivity out of me. By the time I have created a web page, I will be too tired to deal with something both boring and very critical like validation. As a start-up, one’s lack of productivity can be masked by the fact that you are a start-up. In the world of established companies, you need to get things done in a much shorter time frame. The first time I opened a VS IDE, I was shocked by its seeming complexity, but I have come to really like it. As a programmer if you want to have legs, you have to be flexible and keep learning new things (even .NET) unless you want to be stuck in Academia or stuck in start-up mode.

I am not a “very good” programmer. But I am very productive, in my opinion. I am also looking for a new job but not sure I would fit in with your company.

I’m a bit late commenting on this article but it inspired me to reply. I worked in a reasonably large software development team for over 20 years. We used numerous technologies, Fortran, Java, the Microsoft range and open source. From my experience the choice of technology is just not an issue, you can do pretty much everything with any of the platforms. The mix of people and their talents is, however, extremely important.

You must have a combination of good engineers, creative designers and entrepreneurs all working together to enable innovation to thrive. In my experience the most productive engineers are those people who have specialised in a particular technology. They know every aspect of the platform, can build robust code quickly and get the best performance. But these folk don’t normally have the creative skills for UI’s, so get them working with designers and get the whole team fired up by the entrepreneurs – the visionaries. So does someone like me fit in?. I’m a jack of all trades and expert of none, so I provide the motivation and communication that glues the talents together. Sounds a bit like your role Matt. So my advice when recruiting is to craete the right mix of people and try to find everything in one person (eg talented, entrepreneurial minded engineer).

I now have my own start up business – gardening! I can now build my web site in whatever technology I choose and program for the sheer fun of it. If you interested in what I chose see http://www.growideas.co.uk.

I am a fellow disliker of .net as it excessively abstracts HTTP traffic which promotes a distorted view of the way data moves between a browser and a server.

On the flip side c# is my favorite language and IIS7 works very elegantly with c# and you can access the basics of the server handling requests from a browser while still enjoying the syntactic sugar in c#.

Checkout servercyde.com for rapid Javascript based prototyping of application, it is a startup built on .net

May I?

I’m still not sure if I belong to the large company world or to the startup world. Well, I had my share of startups, back in Russia, a while ago. That included taking the risk of carrying cash from the bank to the place where my colleagues are.

Anyways,your post scares me. You are saying that a developer in a startup must be some kind of street whore, adopting to the situation on the fly. If you are a professional software developer, you may take pride in not giving a fuck about the problem of the moment. Maybe your attention span is bigger than a day or two, maybe you bring a solution that would not be a pain in the ass even 2-3 months from now; is it okay in a startup env?

Windows has the most viruses simply because it has the most flaws. Very few important things run on Windows for reason. WIndows is wide-open. Most secure? LOL

Linux has several orders of more hardware that it can run on over Windows. Try running Windows on non-intel hear. Try running 7 on something from 2003.

Basically, you prove the authors point about how clueless and worthless people that get locked in to proprietary crap.

You are drinking from firehose.

In the grand scheme of things buying into MS crap or whatever proprietary pit you want to live in is of little significance compared to dev salaries.

What isn’t insignificant is the lock in and the mindset of “MS will provide me everything I need”, That is poison and results in “programmers” that really only exist to tie together various modules, but not actually build them.

What you want are people good enough to be able to develop these libraries, which 99.9% of the libraries users can not do.

Further, big corporations insist on a ‘my way or the highway’ mindset so the devs become much less skilled over time.

If you want true programmer, you don’t look for people who have shackled themselves to corporate group-think or proprietary tools. They are nothing but API monkeys.

I have yet to meet a good programmer that willingly uses .Net and Java or would work for some behemoth. Ruby, Python,Haskell,Lisp, Scala, Mirah, Ocaml, C and erlang are all superior to the proprietary languages. About the only language that the C# or whatever can beat is PHP, which is so bad even MS couldn’t have designed it.

There is a reason why all the important and innovative work comes out of startups.

MS and Facebook has done nothing of significance technology wise. Google hasn’t done anything good since they were a startup. Once they got big, they have followed the MS way: buy something, make it bigger, bloated, and crappier.

You also have to compromise between features, price and time anywhere you go. Has MS ever put out anything that wasn’t a series of compromises? It is not like these big companies produce anything that is technologically superior or innovative. They have to buy out startups to get that, but then they ALWAYS ruin it.

Few projects at Google amount to more then a pile of crap.

You are not productive, your tools may be.Not only are you not a very good programmer, you are not a programmer. You are an API monkey, an assembly line worker.

Yep….

I couldn’t have said it better myself……

The post has some valid points about corporate life can possibly ruin a future entrepreneur. It’s no coincidence that Bill Gate, Steve Jobs, Larry Page, Mark ZuckBerg, none of them were ever employed. And the list goes on. However, I doubt that the corporate life can totally destroy a true entrepreneur. Your day will come if you fight for it and you deserve it, not because you are or not employed by Microsoft, Apple, Google, or Facebook.

I take great exception to the jab about Asperger’s Syndrome. My husband is a developer with Asperger’s Syndrome, and while he many not be able to intuitively read social cues, he is more than willing to adapt to any situation when given explicit feedback and has never been “difficult to work with” by starting a fight with another team member. All of the other people I know with Asperger’s have been similar.

Please don’t fling mud at people with legitimate disabilities.

Err, may not be able to.

The problem here is that there are not enough coders to go around, and no one is teaching us. How many companies, start up or otherwise actually take the initiative to invite noobs along and actually teach them how to code? NONE! I think in the end, learning how to code from a seasoned programmer is the way to go…..There is lots of talent, but still not enough for the US, right?

I went too the store to times and almost purchased two many items so I put to of them back.

Put that in your spell checker………

[...] use of these freely available operating systems. Startups and others see this often as do those who evaluate startup candidates. With a license that does not restrict use nor generally requires payment for general purpose [...]

“I am surprised by the number of genuinely talented people who––because of choices they’ve made in their career––are now unqualified to work at an actual web startup or start their own.”

If you could be 1000% correct then you’re 1 MILLION percent correct. I know this first hand. It sucks. Microsoft work did me well for quite a while but once they shifted to this dot net crap, I fell behind and for a while falling behind was OK but now that no one does the “classic” VB or ASP work, and the maintenance of those older apps are over, I am dead in the water. Well, dying in the water trying to understand Linux, Perl, Python, and the slew of other important technologies in a world OTHER THAN Microsoft. At nearly 50, it sucks to not “know anything” anymore. And its more difficult to learn than it was for me 30 years ago.

Thanks for the info – great to get an candid account of the hiring thought process of a legitimate start-up.

However, I must also re-iterate what other have said. When I read:

” Outside of Facebook, Asperger’s Syndrome is not thought of as an “asset”. ”

my metaphorical jaw dropped! I can understand that a team is better off if all members have a good emotional read on others to perhaps better promote a collaborative and positive environment, but I do hope that if you happen to “mistakenly” hire someone with Aspergers (I say mistakenly, because it is clear that they will be discriminated against in the hiring process, albeit discretely), and their condition becomes known to you after the fact, that you do make reasonable accommodations for that person as the Americans with Disabilities Act demands.

Maybe grow some compassion too!

Kindly Offended,
Matt