Thursday, May 19, 2005

Still here... thinking about hiring people.

Why are things so slow here? Hmm, is it:

  1. I got canned (and brought some sense of ironic justice to this world), or
  2. I'm just plain lazy.

It's #2 (the usual safe bet), though tomorrow is another day for #1. Given the recent crappy Redmond weather I find myself with some spare time.

I got a bit flummoxed by the latest bug in Google's BlogSpot Mail2Blogger that no longer deals well with the way I post (ergo, the nice HTML decorated posting I haven't gotten around to cleaning up). So I said "to heck with that!" for a while. I've got enough gadgets giving me grief I don't want to try to debug Google's Blogger through a double-blind system.

So now I'm going to post by just sending missives directly from Outlook as an HTML message, which is going to look awful because you're not going to get your default reading font anymore and Word / Outlook are going to conspire together to gunk up the HTML with a bunch of style crap. Sorry. We're all just getting what we paid for here.

Okay, any interesting random things here... one comment asks:

I'm interested to find out, if I quit MS right before Sept 1st, say, mid Aug (suppose all ranking, reviewing is done by this time), will I still get my annual performance bonus?

I truly don't know. You should figure out a way to ask your HR generalist (that will be quite the challenge). But of course you have to look at the benefits of starting with a new company sooner vs. hanging around doing something you know you're leaving. I have a feeling, though, if you're not getting your paycheck the day the bonus gets deposited, you're not getting your bonus.

Lots of back and forth commenting in the Sugar Daddies Going Sour. Pretty good to scan through if you haven't already.

Redmond has said "Okay!" to Microsoft's expansion plan. (Slap to ample forehead.)

Okay. Let me play Devil's Advocate here and say, for a moment, that I was really behind Microsoft growing by 12,000 individuals and super-motivated to get those people hired over some kind of timeframe, while at the same time back-filling any attrition. Suppose I have an Excel graph projecting these hires and their assignments and all that good stuff. Just one thing:

Where's the genetic-research pharm where we are growing all of these incoming new hires? Because if you've been even tangentially involved in trying to hire a high-quality person, you've got to realize it's nearly impossible. What I'm seeing (this is dev focused):

  • High quality people don't want to work for Microsoft.
  • Low quality people are swelling our interview loops to the degree I'm really worried some of them are slopping up on deck and joining the crew.
  • The good quality people we do give offers to get hired elsewhere for much better pay (just pay, not benefits - I don't think anyone on this green earth can do much better than Microsoft's benefits).
  • Some colleges produce graduates who don't know what a pointer is let alone how to use one.
  • H1B visas aren't going to be unfettered anytime soon.

Anyway. If you want to bulldoze over the athletic field and plop some new mega-building monstrosity there, you'd better at least start addressing some of those points above if you want to occupy it with anything more than clumping mouth-breathers.

What else, what else... that Microsophist appeared and got all sorts of online recognition! And then *poof* no more posts. Well, who am I to throw black rocks. One thing that impressed me, though, is that folks out there are interested in hearing what Microsofties think about the company and what's going right and what's going wrong.

Okay, enough for now. I do have notes about other topics, it's just a matter of avoiding getting whacked by the lazy stick so much..

 

No comments:

Post a Comment