Date: Thu, 4 Apr 2002 01:59:17 -0800 From: William Carrel <william.a@carrel.org> To: chat@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Anti-Unix Site Runs Unix Message-ID: <A0B14BDC-47B2-11D6-BF98-003065D5E9A4@carrel.org> In-Reply-To: <007c01c1db91$63596b70$0a00000a@atkielski.com>
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On Wednesday, April 3, 2002, at 08:30 PM, Anthony Atkielski wrote: > Correct. Microsoft has never been very interested in credentials; the > company tests prospective employees carefully with some thinly > disguised IQ > tests, and uses intelligence as a key hiring criterion. Smart people > are > hired; stupid people are not. And degrees and diplomas are largely > ignored. A) Microsoft hires mainly smart people > The problems you experienced are not due to any lack of qualification > on the > part of technical-support personnel; they are due to a total lack of > internal documentation for the products being supported. Technical > support > at Microsoft, as at many other software vendors, is based on a > trial-and-error, shotgun approach to problem identification and > resolution, > because none of Microsoft's products has ever been adequately > documented, > even internally, and so nobody really knows how they work except the > developers, and even the developers know very little beyond the modules > they > personally maintain. B) Microsoft develops software in a kit-bash sort of manner without adequate testing, documentation, and communication between teams >> On FreeBSD on the other hand, I've found little >> nitpicky bugs here and there, and generally had >> prompt resolution once I actually got someone >> to look at the PR. *wink wink* > > The people looking at the PR were probably people who also wrote or > maintained the relevant code. At Microsoft and other large, commercial > software vendors, the chances of the developer of any code actually > looking > at technical-support issues for that code are almost nil. Developers > are > kept busy writing code, not supporting it, in part because this is more > cost-effective, and in part because developers who are forced to > document or > support their code often quit. C) People who write code in a professional manner often quit working for Microsoft I will add a fact that I think should be hard to argue against: D) People who write code in a professional manner are smart. Either A is false and B, C, and D are true. Or, B and C are false. Since I have personally witnessed that C is true and I've heard quite a bit of anecdotal evidence of B from current and former Microsoft employees, I'm led to believe that A is false. In any case there is a fallacy of inconsistency in your argument. Ergo, just because you qualify for Mensa and/or to be a contestant on Jeopardy, that is to say that you pass the barrage of Microsoft's silly questions (search Google for "Microsoft Interview Questions" if you're bored some time), does not make you smart or effective at programming or technical support, or at competing lawfully in a free market society for that matter. So I reject your assertion about the relative intelligence most of Microsoft's employees compared to those elsewhere (at Sun or Apple, for example). Microsoft's employees are probably on par with most other large technical organizations intelligence-wise. Maybe subpar in some ethical ways since they are associated with an enterprise that has committed fairly aggregious violations of U.S. and European anti-trust law. And in the case of my specific problem, anyone with a basic understanding of HTTP would see that the problem was with the HTTP interaction and independent of the server I'm using. "The problem is probably because you're requested the page from a server running Apache and FreeBSD" seems like a limited depth fallacy in order to facilitate a cheap attempt to sell more IIS licenses. And it still wouldn't have solved my problem if I'd used IIS. Somehow, I've managed to avoid a variety of ad hominem attacks that are pretty obvious from looking at your historical posts to FreeBSD groups, your homepage, and your physical distance from Microsoft's main campus. No asbestos suit needed. -- William Carrel To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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