Microsoft confessions there were a ton o…
Do middling, middle managers run Microsoft? That’s the consensus among the former Microsofties who shared their work stories with me over the last couple months. The new work week starts with another Microsoft Confessional the fourth in four days from 13-year company veteran Boris, which isn’t his real name, of course. Boris was smart enough to see the end coming, and he made preparations in the days before his May 2009 layoff.
He learned to read middle managers the way a genuine fortune teller might read tea leaves.People being asked to leave are one view of Microsoft. But those leaving voluntarily are another perspective.
In looking at Microsoft, I’m hugely concerned about the departures of two important and long-time Microsoft executives: Mike Nash and Bill Veghte, revealed on February 4 and January 14, respectively. Both men are 19-plus years veterans working for the Windows and Windows Live groups. Nash is headed to Amazon, and Veghte departs following last year’s executive shuffle that put Steven Sinfosky in charge of the group (as one of five Microsoft presidents).
Historically, successful shipment of a new Windows version ends with big promotions. Windows Vista was the exception, leading to demotions, sideways transfers and departures (Microsoft wouldn’t call them firings).
But Windows 7 is a huge success, so what gives with Nash and Veghte leaving Microsoft?
The departures of Nash, Veghte and also Chris Liddell, Microsoft’s former chief financial officer, are canaries in the coal mine. They signal something fundamentally wrong. Boris’ story and the three before it “Killed over politics,” ”Deeply dysfunctional family” and “Poor worker bees” offer some insight into what is part of the problem.
Boris’ story is the longest of the quartet of confessionals; as such, I’ve added subheads to make it easier reading. With that introduction, Boris’ story:My career out of college started with working as a technical writer for a few now-defunct engineering software firms. I recall my first day on the job, being assigned a massive Compaq ‘portable’ as my workstation, and teaching myself MS-DOS and batch file programming via the Compaq’s user manual.
We had a cool array of hardware around the office for porting: IBM AS/400, Silicon Graphics Iris and Indigo, some of the early Sun SPARCstations, and my favorite, a NeXT Cube. During the next five years I moved up from a junior writing position to managing an entire department of writers and illustrators. I was largely self-taught as a manager.
Basically, it is no different than writing for any other speech: - Don't memorize perfectly - Do extensive research (you'll memorize automatically this way) - Use careful sources - Concerning Wikipedia: Generally for papers, you would never use wikipedia, but when you are studying for a test or give a speech, nobody cares Just calm down and you'll do fine.
Maybe you could create a handout that's kind of like a quiz. Like, after you explain the first sounds and words a baby makes, you could give a worksheet that has questions like, Which of the following would a baby be most likely to utter? A) ma B) tha C) za D) la Stuff like that, where you're including content that you've just presented. Good luck!