Running the Microsoft Personnel Gauntlet

Ed Frauenheim of cnet discussed the difficulty of running the Microsoft personnel gauntlet, er, "puzzle". Why are they so arrogant? Obvious answer - they're a big fish. And some managers think that if their company is big, so are they and act accordingly. However, once they leave the "hive" they usually sink back into the ooze they emerged from in the first place.

When one of the Microsoft recruiters came for me back in the mid-1990's, I ended up hiring him to staff one of my funded startups - InterProphet. I recommend that startups in competitive times recruit a Microsoft recruiter - they're very good.

On the serious side, the simple reason that Microsoft has difficulty in hiring is their antipathy to anyone who has worked with open source. This "us versus them" mindset has caused them to lose out on very talented people and on new directions in research and development in operating systems.

I recall one time during an invite-only get-together on media, I happened to ask the Microsoft VP about how they could ensure that a university using their software could maintain their academic freedom in their research on operating systems without impacting anyone's rights. Instead of dealing with a very narrow question he launched into a diatribe about how open source will not succeed. I didn't mention "open source" - I was talking research and academic control of works - but it didn't seem to make any difference to Microsoft. They don't understand why a university researcher needs a great deal of freedom in working out new solutions to new problems. In fact, they don't even see a problem, even when their own people (as in the comments section) find themselves mired in endless patches and pre-release cycles.

To paraphrase Charles Darwin, "all things must evolve" - even operating systems and companies. And that, so to speak, is the "source" of their recruiting and corporate problem.