Wesner Moise

Microsoft

1994-2000

I worked as a software design engineer in the Microsoft Excel group for PivotTables.

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  • TechEd Presentations. I gave two presentations at a TechEd conference for OLAP PivotTable and Access Data Projects.

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  • Patent Filing. I was awarded a PivotTable patent regarding banded reports styled formatting.

“Automatic Formatting of PivotTable Reports Within a Spreadsheet”

US Patent #6,626,959

The patent was filed in 1999 and granted in 2003.

Why I left Microsoft?

I worked at Microsoft for over six years as a software developer in the Microsoft Excel group. I left Microsoft a week before my MBA studies commenced in 2000. I attended UCLA Anderson School of Business to study technology entrepreneurship. I was offered a Dean’s Fellowship that paid for my tuition and someday I will reimburse the fund.

I thought some of my concerns were unique: Some people from Office have written about why they left, and I am somewhat surprised at how some of their complaints were still valid from when I left. Jackie Konzelman states why she left her PM position at Microsoft Office to work on a startup. Karen Cheng tells why she left her designer position at Microsoft.

There were a lot of things that I didn’t like about Microsoft, but very few of those would have caused me to leave.

My compensation was not acceptable.

My time and effort wasn’t valued.

I was being harassed on the regular basis, frequently found myself being prejudged.

My values didn’t match. Was the company interested in technological progress or market dominance? Most technological advances that I saw were occurring outside the company.

I did not feel that my contributions were having a real meaning impact. Legacy code, antiquated languages and practices.

I am not learning.

Excel One-on-One:

My manager had a stunned look on his face:

You picked up so many areas of Excel in such a short time — (then listing ten different areas). There are people in this hallway right now, struggling with the code. Your problems are different from everyone else’s. Your problems have to do with communication. No one understands what you’re trying to say.

Maybe, you have a different style.

A concern of mine is illustrated by a page in Bret Victor’s website: http://worrydream.com/Apple. Bret Victor is a former designer at Apple, who left because some of his passionate ideas weren’t used at Apple, and he was no longer able to use/mention those ideas once he left Apple. This could simply be a restriction that was unique to his design role. Ironically, after he left, he gave a widely circulated presentation “Inventing on Principle” ( http://vimeo.com/36579366 ) that influenced Apple’s IDE for the new Swift language as well as numerous code learning websites (like Khan Academy) to teach javascript using Processing JS.

Culture

Harassment

  • Future exec told me, you have to leave your group. Your coworkers are making fun of you. He mentioned a specific person, who said, oh he’s the guy we always make fun of.

  • OLE Bug

  • Experience

    • NYNEX internship

  • Race, Asperger’s whatever

    • Gossip and unfairness

      • Humiliation

        • Frat behavior

        • Toxic environment

        • No respect as per corporate policy

      • Perception

        • When two people repeat something

        • Also, coworkers work, lived, and hung out together

      • Fit

        • No driving, cars, drinkings or other entertainment

        • Also, not much exercising

    • Diversity training from Neopoleon blog

    • Minimization and devaluation of intelligence

    • Some coworker told me that a meeting we had was best ever

    • Recommendations

      • From two PMs

      • From a Harvard doctoral student – outstanding quality candidate

    • Not a strong communicator

      • Communication Reflex – silent mute

      • Schizophrenically articulate and awkward – sometimes you are incredibly articulate and sometimes blah

      • Speaking skills varied according to community, better when I am in individual setting

      • Programming and Speaking interfere – almost as if occupying same neurons

      • Very forgetful

  • Asperger’s

    • Parent’s encouraged to provide early social stimulation to children, and to avoid having them to attached to things early on

  • Instances

    • Retard comment early on

      • SAT scores

    • Alpha moment with Tetris

      • Didn’t pay up

      • Criticize my skill set and how badly I won’t play against everyone

    • Doom harassment

    • Lost a promotion opportunity

  • Dev one-on-one

    • Picked up a lot of code in such a short time… others are struggling

    • Different style

  • Putdowns

    • You are not smart… coughs

    • Overpaid… I made less than you - vindictive

    • Dev Manager learned on the job

      • Knew more C++ and internet than him

      • Saw him patch code by hand

  • Interacted with members from other groups

Long hours

  • Sleeping overnight

    • Maybe a whole year

    • Irradiated

    • Spent 4 summers working on Sunday midnight

  • Wrote 10X the code in Office 97

    • Assert fix

    • Clearreg

    • Profile

  • Long hours – coming after midnight

    • Add additional features

    • Took on more features…. When I should have taken less to focus on external and process improvement – communicate more with people

    • Lack of mentorship

  • Marissa Meyer

    • Resentment memo

    • Long hours

  • Steven Sinofsky

    • One strategy

    • Long hours

    • Competence

  • Strategy

    • Dated Because career wasn’t going anywhere

    • Played chess for intellectual accomplishment and also satisfication of beating people

    • Strategy Shift – thinking entrepreneurship

    • Outward accomplishments – books, websites (search engine, desktop themere)

Lack of Innovation

  • HTML and Web interfaces more advanced than windows

  • Internet in library – only one using it – I can’t believe no one was using

    • Internet access required exec permission and product justification

    • Source code access

    • Allard article about Internet

  • Text file formats, style sheets, layout

  • Other products better designed, not geeky

  • Take best practices from industry, usurp pioneers and take advantage of their risks

  • Poor taste in general; evolutionary, short-term thinking

  • Ballmer quotes about innovation

  • Wins95 API,

    • UCLA comment about Windows ME

    • Epiphany about Windows Executive and PM in Windows NT

  • Lack of standards compliance with C++, advancements

    • All about linking products

  • Follower strategy

    • Groupware

    • Networking

    • Pen

    • Video

    • Tablets

    • Smart Phones

    • Search Engines

    • BI

    • Multimedia, Photo Gallery, Desktop Composition from OSX (start your copiers)

    • Zune

    • Java

    • Herbold

    • Best practices

  • No customer understanding

    • MSDE

    • Opaque products – ASP.NET, VB6

    • COM mess

    • Verbose programming

  • Recent

    • Cleaner development – Easier VB heritage

    • Internet openness - Unit testing, open soource

Integrity

  • Catholic education

  • World is a farce

    • NYNEX fake exec demo

    • Synch-and-stabilize

  • Li comment about integrity

  • Ballmer defiance against justice dept

  • Milking R&D speech

  • Anticompetitive behavior

  • Trustworthy computing

  • Stock market negotiation

  • Poorly negotiated salaries

    • Don’t want to give my ideas – because I don’t believe I will be paid adequately for them

    • Presumption of incompetence

Entrepreneurship

  • Fear of Class Ceiling

    • Career advice

      • Advance degree to combat racism

      • Be better and stronger

      • Race automatically creates impression

    • Diversity initiative

      • African American harassment lawsuit

      • Diversity advancement

      • Almost promotion for pivot tables

  • Medical salary

    • All my family friends were doctors

    • High quality of life unlikely to be met by working at Microsoft

    • Needs cannot be paid for

    • Data Validation guy left because there was nothing there at home at the end of the day

    • Unsure about future pay and stock

    • Pay not adequate

      • Not comparable to other new hires in industry and outside

      • Lower than internship

      • Lower than 50 less of current hire salaries

      • Salary same as entry level community college grad with no math education

  • Long hours, lots of code meant nothing

  • Doctors and lawyers are really business owners

  • Translate IQ and money into entrepreneurial wealth

  • High IQ

    • Triple 9

    • Performance at Harvard exams

    • Professor Tabbush honor

    • IQ tests are ‘fundamentally flawed’

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/iq-tests-are-fundamentally-flawed-and-using-them-alone-to-measure-intelligence-is-a-fallacy-study-finds-8425911.html

Mismeasure of Intelligence

  • Semantic programming

    • Proprietary advance state-of-the-art technology

  • Consulted after Microsoft (mistake)

  • Bad equipment

  • Bad process

  • No documentation

  • Bad teamwork

  • Designed for people who want to find an opening to work there

  • Bad food, No dinner, Private offices

  • Grueling unrewarding work

    • Features come from high… No input

  • Works a lot (when at Microsoft)

  • often put 7 days a week

  • Had a bed in my office; probably spent 6mths worth at the office

  • Kicked 3times out on summer sunday morning during building xrays

  • Wrote most lines of code in Excel 97 ~36KLOC net lines of code added; 10X the average developer, 6X the next highest developer (>70K changed; >20K deleted; 56KLOC added; 36K=56K-20K net added)

  • Contributes to work beyond function

  • developed tools for Excel (code checkers, build tools)

  • produced documentation for PivotTables and setup

  • independently investigated moving codebase to C++

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