Macho Macho Microsofties - New comment on Looking Forward - Reviews, The Company Meeting, and Then Some...

Anonymous has left a new comment on your post "Looking Forward - Reviews, The Company Meeting, and Then Some...":

I think a strong argument can be made that people at Microsoft "deserve" more money. Microsoft claims to hire the best and the brightest and then only pays them 66th percentile. That doesn't seem fair. But anybody who claims that Microsoft doesn't pay "enough" is nuts.


That's pure bullshit. Microsoft does not hire the best and brightest. I've interacted with a large cross section of the company and come to the conclusion that Microsofties are merely above average. But there are many macho guys at MSFT, though. But they seem to act macho only within the company and cannot get their dicks up on the streets.

I went a top Ivy school for Ph.D.. There I made a lot of undergrad friends. The best almost never came to MSFT. Only those in the second or third quantile joined.

You have to understand that during the dotcom boom, especially during the 1998-2001 period, the best and brightest went to the startups. Afterwards, most went to google. I was stupid not to take my google offer more than five years ago. I've since heard there are other who "lost" even more than I do. But, you never know. It's always a gamble.

Let's face it. Most programming jobs at MSFT require little training but a lot of patience. Of course to do well at MSFT often requires something else. This is probably why a lot of guys have taken on the macho (or Type A) personality. (Or the macho type is often found on campus.) I've seen some who are particularly obnoxious in this respect. But I suspect, with good reasons, that the cause for their behavior is an unsatiable need for approval. This type of people are often driven to seek achievements that are measured by commonly acknowledged standards, such as test scores and grades. But they are not the best and brightest, definitely not original. Unforunately, MSFT has hired a lot of them, for a very simple reason: It's relatively easy to manipulate them to work as foot soldiers; all one needs to do is to give and withhold approval at appropriate times.

Frankly, there's really no need to pay these people more than 80K a year. I predict that within 2-3 years, most of the positions in Redmond can be replaced by Chinese or Indian-schooled techies.

(We must spread this machismo through-out the techie world! Our future depends on it!)