Global Nerdy

Trust me, it’ll do wonders.

Me and Steve Ballmer at the Canadian Windows 7 launch, October 2009.

The Wall Street Journal’s recent article on Steve Ballmer’s upcoming departure from Microsoft says that it wasn’t a firing, but that he was getting strong pressure to leave from the board, who felt that he wasn’t making the necessary changes quickly enough. Among the rank-and-file, the feeling was the same, as a story from my last days at The Empire:

Certain identifying details in this story have been changed to protect the innocent. Namely, me.

“So,” said one Microsoft manager, well into one of those post-party parties at the 2011 Microsoft MVP Summit, in those wee hours of the morning when the last shreds of careerist pretense dissolve in Glenlivet and the candor comes out, “what do you think of Ballmer?”

Standard Operating Procedure at Microsoft is that the highest-level person in a group of dining or drinking Microsofties pays and expenses. Like World of Warcraft, Microsoft has numbered levels. Also like World of Warcraft, the fun begins at level 60. I was a level 61, these guys were level 63, and I was enjoying scotches on their expense accounts.

“He’s got to go,” said another manager.

“Oh yeah,” said the one who posed the question.

“Probably,” said another, with a look on his face that suggested that he was wondering if this conversation would come back to haunt him at some later date, when a promotion to the next level was on the line. At Microsoft, you’re encouraged to think about that next rung on your career ladder all the time.

Ballmer’s decision to leave was a tough one, especially for a guy who really, truly, and enthusiastically loves the company with a passion that I didn’t often see inside Microsoft Canada’s walls (Redmond was a little different, but in the Toronto office, it was like a medieval Italian village, and not in the good way). I know a lot of people who could never make that statement “At the end of the day, we need to break a pattern. Face it: I’m a pattern” in public, never mind in those quiet moments during a long dark night of the soul.

I’ll leave it to Alex Wilhelm at TechCrunch to summarize:

Ballmer was an imperfect CEO, but his final years will be considered his legacy, and I think that the changes he made to the company that he viscerally loves will bear out as generally correct. He initiated a new business model, began to reform key product lines to protect revenue streams and meet market requirements, turned the company into a respectable, if still flawed, hardware company, and retooled its executive layout to prevent it from shredding itself through internecine warfare as it has for so long.

Yes, there was Vista, Zune, Kin and a host of other flops under his tenure. But the Microsoft of today is the strongest that I can remember it being, and that’s not a bad note for Ballmer to leave on.

Found in Jad Jabbour’s Pinterest.

And hey, for old times’ sake:

RayWenderlich.com, one of my go-to sites for iOS development, recently published a series of articles on resumes and job interviews. While they’re writing primarily for iOS developers, most of the advice they give applies to developers of all stripes. Check ’em out:

• How to apply for an iOS developer job: Practical tips about how to craft a great resume and cover letter.
• iOS developer resume examples: Examples of cover letters and resumes, plus some good advice.
• iOS interview questions: How to prepare for a technical interview, questions that you might be asked if applying for an iOS development position, and a few words on the practical coding interview.
• The “interview tips and tricks” Google hangout video: A conversation with iOS/Mac development manager Kyle Richter about making the most of your job interview.

If you’ve just come from a job interview and didn’t think it went well, you can console yourself by reading about a recent job interview of mine that I blew six ways from Sunday. It’s covered in this article, with this follow-up.

I’m very pleased to hear about the partnership that Microsoft and Xamarin announced today, which brings together the company behind the C# programming language and the company who make it much easier to use it to write apps for platforms beyond Microsoft’s. This is good news for people who like the C# programming language — and there’s a lot to like — but who also want to develop apps for iOS and Android.

The first three results of this partnership will be:

1. Truly Portable Class Libraries –  Portable Class Library (PCL) projects will now be fully supported on both iOS and Android, making it easier than ever for C# developers to share code across devices. Code common to all platforms can stay in a single, central project and then referenced from platform-specific code in the same solution, whether Android, iOS, Windows Phone, or Windows Store. PCL project references will allow developers to bounce back-and-forth between PCL and platform-specific projects.

2. Support for Visual Studio 2013 – Xamarin and Microsoft released significant improvements to Xamarin’s Visual Studio extensions, as well as support for Visual Studio 2013, and more integrations have been promised.

3. Special offers for MSDN Subscribers – Microsoft and Xamarin have created special offers for MSDN subscribers, including special pricing on new purchases of Xamarin, extending the trial period from 30 to 90 days, and free training from the newly-announced Xamarin University.

This is great news, because…

C# rocks!

For all the things that are wrong about Microsoft, there has consistently one thing that’s been right about them since 2000: the C# programming language.

Started as “Project COOL”, where COOL was an acronym for “C-like Object-Oriented Language”, C# was meant to be Microsoft’s answer to Java, with the ability to interoperate with COM, Microsoft’s Component Object Model, the binary interface standard that underlay a lot of Microsoft technologies, including OLE, ActiveX, Windows Shell, Windows Runtime, and DirectX. When it first started, C# was always playing catch-up with Java, but over the past few years, and most notably with the release of C# 3.0, it’s Java that’s being left behind in terms of language features and expressiveness. This list posted on Stack Overflow does a pretty good job of laundry-listing where C# beats Java:

• Closures;
• Runtime generics;
• Generics of primitive types (benchmarks of this sorting a list of a million ints vs a million Integer objects have revealed a factor of 3 improvement);
• Delegates;
• Events;
• LINQ;
• Extension methods;
• First-class properties;
• Operator overloading;
• Indexers;
• Anonymous types;
• Expression trees;
• Using blocks;
• No checked exceptions. Hooray!
• Decimal type;
• As of C# 4.0: the dynamic type, which is basically duck typing.

I’ve been doing some noodling with Java while teaching myself Android programming, and having come from the world of C#, Java feels so ghetto. I’m going to have to do some noodling with Xamarin’s tools now!

Dwight K. Schrute: Stack ranking’s logical conclusion.

Microsoft has announced that they are eliminating stack ranking, the infamous and much-maligned system that required managers doing annual reviews to place their direct reports in one of three categories or “buckets”:

• “Achieve”, into which 70% of your direct reports would go. The official description of the sort of person your supposed to put into this bucket is “Demonstrates potential at minimum to broaden in one’s role or to advance one career stage or level as a leader – either as a People Manager and/or individual contributor. Past performance suggests capability of delivering consistent and significant contributions over long-term. Competencies typically are at expected levels.”
• “Exceed”, where you’d place the top 20%. If you did particularly well that year, you’d be put into this category. The description reads: “Demonstrates potential to advance faster than average as a leader – either as a People Manager and/or individual contributor – preferably multiple levels or two career stages. Past performance suggests capability of delivering exceptional results over long-term. Competencies typically are at or above expected levels.”
• “Underachieve”, or the bottom 10%. This category comes with a set of consequences and often a lot of self-loathing and voluntary departure from the company. “Demonstrates limited potential to advance.”

Stack ranking was cited in Kurt Eichenwald’s damning article in Vanity Fair on “Microsoft’s Lost Decade” as being one of the reasons that the company, while financially successful, doesn’t define tech the way it used to. According to the article, it created situations where superstars would refuse to work on the same team, and it also incentivized teammates to compete against each other, in that sort of “I don’t have to outrun the bear, I just have to outrun you” way. I came on the team with 7 years’ worth of solo blogging under my belt and my own audience, and one way I put myself ahead was to simply outblog them — I wrote nearly 800 articles between October 2008 and April 2011. (As of this writing, I still have the most-viewed article on Canadian Developer Connection, and I left two and a half years ago.)

When chatting with former Microsofties about their former lives at The Empire, I found that most of them hated the system, saying that it rewarded those who spent more time “managing up” than getting the job done; it encouraged ass-kissing over actual productivity.

Simply put, stack ranking was creating an organization of Dwight K. Schrutes.

If you don’t believe me, then how about someone who worked at the same level as my manager, who commented on my earlier article about Microsoft’s stack ranking system?

You forgot one important aspect of the ranking process: calibration. Your manager talks about your performance in front of his peers and then together they “calibrate” how you performed relative to your peers.

This would shine a spotlight on folks who networked well, picked opportunities to “own scorecards” and exceeded them by crunching numbers and on backs of others by running “v-teams”, vs the actual do-ers and Subject Matter Experts who would do the heavy lifting. Extra calibration points who did a bang-up job on ‘launching’ something that made management look good (product, project, even if it were an internal one).

The calibration process turned into a contest in how well you schmoozed with your boss’s peers — based on criteria that are completely subjective and emphasized ability to do well in a pack vs. standing out. Folks like you, Joey, were the “outsiders” who were clearly not a team-player and too threatening b/c you actually knew the subject-matter, the audience and were liked by folks you dealt with on the outside, versus some mediocre manager’s buddy on the inside.

The elimination of stack ranking isn’t one of those things that Microsoft’s customers will notice, but it will have a direct impact on the people who work there, with increased job satisfaction, better cooperation, more employee retention, and less Macchiavelli all ’round. Those improvements may be reflected in their products, and that’s something customers will see.

I’m on vacation in the lovely San Francisco Bay Area until next Monday, November 11th, when regular postings resume.