To be honest I'm not a native english speaker, so I might be using words wrong.

You're using the words in a way which has become normal; nobody will mistake your meaning. I'm just observing a shift in the use of language over time which feels strange to me.

Thanks for sharing!

Same experience for me, I still remember at IC1 getting 7k stocks over 5 years as my "stock bonus" for the year. which meant getting 1 or 2 MSFT stock every 4 months :D

Right, but there is even an implicit pact, you get lower-than-market compensation but you get better benefits and long-term stability. At least that's the mental math you did when joining the company and comparing offers between employers.

Yeah, I was afraid of generalizing throughout the company. I think compared to other companies it seems to have a benefit of being more "nice". Maybe it's mostly targeted towards tech roles at that?

I think everyone should dissuade themselves of the concept that such a thing as a "nice" company really truly exists. I've worked at close to 10 companies in my career both public and private.

Some of the companies I've worked the big "family" culture and "our people are our greatest asset" company principles were the ones to do the deepest and swiftest cuts. Meanwhile their supposedly comparatively ruthless shark infested competitors keep on keeping on.

The people I saw most impacted by this were the ones that took the culture both literally and seriously, staying in the big happy family companies long enough to develop far too much company-specific rather than industry specific expertise, just in time to get laid off at 50.

> big happy family companies long enough to develop far too much company-specific rather than industry specific expertise, just in time to get laid off at 50.

I think this is a great point. Lately this is number one thing I feel concerned about. Though paradoxically they are coming from different direction as pushing buzzword driven development too fast in process making stable products unstable, calling them out of date. And then getting rid of products along the people who worked on them as dead weight.

You thought MS was "nice"? WTF were you smoking?

Comparatively to other companies, (amazon meta) I feel like Microsoft is "nicer"

Been at MS 15 years, the unspoken “pact” is truthful.

I mean yeah, in theory. I just found it really hard to work on multiple changes at a time vs git branches. Back in SD i used to have 2 or 3 machines + multiple VMs to be able to work on multiple things at a time. So I wouldn't say no need. In git I can do work, submit, switch, do work submit switch.

Shallow clone of all of office, not onenote.

Oh alright. Thanks.

You’d be surprised at the amount of people at Microsoft that their entire career have been at Microsoft (pre-git-creation) that never used Git. Git is relatively new (2005) but source control systems are not.

Not everyone wants to code for hobby, so if their work not uses git then they too will not use it.

Not everyone _can_ code as a hobby. Some of us are old and have families and other commitments

That's when you can only hope that your workplace is one that trains - so the investment isn't one sided.

Agreed. In my professional career, the vast majority of devs I've worked with never wrote a single line of code outside of the office.

This is one of the problems at big tech - people 10-20 years in and haven't lived in the outside world. It's a hard problem to solve.

I believe it. If you are a die-hard Microsoft person, your view of computing would be radically different from even the average developer today, let alone devs who are used to using FOSS.

Turn it around: If I were to apply for a job at Microsoft, they would probably find that my not using Windows for over twenty years is a gap on my CV (not one I would care to fill, mind).

It would very much depend on the team. There's no shortage of those that ship products for macOS and Linux, and sometimes that can even be the dominant platform.

The same could be said of .NET, Wordpress, or Docker.

Yes? If its in your field, like a webdev who has never touched Wordpress, it can be surprising. An automated tester who has never tried containers also has a problem.

These are young industries. So most hiring teams expect that you take the time to learn new technologies as they become established.

How did you program the WIFI driver? How do you even start creating a WIFI driver from BASIC? (Is it in basic?)

It’s all NetBSD underneath. The WiFi was only difficult because of missing DTBs for the Pi Zero 2.

There is a config file that you can edit within BASIC to set the WiFi up though.

> For context, if we tried this with “vanilla Git”, before we started our work, many of the commands would take 30 minutes up to hours and a few would never complete. The fact that most of them are less than 20 seconds is a huge step but it still sucks if you have to wait 10-15 seconds for everything. When we first rolled it out, the results were much better. That’s been one of our key learnings. If you read my post that introduced GVFS, you’ll see I talked about how we did work in Git and GVFS to change many operations from being proportional to the number of files in the repo to instead be proportional to the number of files “read”. It turns out that, over time, engineers crawl across the code base and touch more and more stuff leading to a problem we call “over hydration”. Basically, you end up with a bunch of files that were touched at some point but aren’t really used any longer and certainly never modified. This leads to a gradual degradation in performance. Individuals can “clean up” their enlistment but that’s a hassle and people don’t, so the system gets slower and slower.

Great quote from him here.