Vote of Confidence. Not!
I recently did a phone-interview with Microsoft (AKA The Evil Empire). I was actually pretty flattered because MS-Israel are known to be pretty picky, and I'm not even an academic. I don't know if I'd actually want to work there, because I don't like business practice of "enforcing" lousy technological decisions and sub-par products on their customers.
By far, one of the worst MS products is their software development suite, Visual Studio, which they very cleverly force on us programmers, by bundling it with Windows and Office licenses, which convinces the damn-fool PHBs. This product is about 10-15 YEARS behind standard features/practice in similar products, some of which are free! It's SO bad that after people pay hundreds of dollars for a license, they will spend another 250$, for a "plug-in" to make it tolerable. The most popular of these is Visual Assist.
Anyway, the interview went pretty well, and I got the usual "we'll be in touch" response. Asked if I had any questions, I decided to satisfy my curiosity. I asked "how many of you use Visual Assist?" The answer I got was "not very many", but the reason for this surprised me even more. Turns out that the vast majority of engineers in this group in Microsoft, do NOT use the Microsoft product! Most use Source Insight!
Talk about endorsing your own product. :-D
By far, one of the worst MS products is their software development suite, Visual Studio, which they very cleverly force on us programmers, by bundling it with Windows and Office licenses, which convinces the damn-fool PHBs. This product is about 10-15 YEARS behind standard features/practice in similar products, some of which are free! It's SO bad that after people pay hundreds of dollars for a license, they will spend another 250$, for a "plug-in" to make it tolerable. The most popular of these is Visual Assist.
Anyway, the interview went pretty well, and I got the usual "we'll be in touch" response. Asked if I had any questions, I decided to satisfy my curiosity. I asked "how many of you use Visual Assist?" The answer I got was "not very many", but the reason for this surprised me even more. Turns out that the vast majority of engineers in this group in Microsoft, do NOT use the Microsoft product! Most use Source Insight!
Talk about endorsing your own product. :-D