rationalize
Rationalize - One of the oft-cited reasons for working at Microsoft is that “you get to work with lots of smart people.” From my experience, it is true: for an organization of this size, the density of hyper-creative and smart people is unmatched. If you ever get tired of always having to be the smartest one in your office, Microsoft is the cure. However, this privilege of being surrounded by a bunch of other ruthlessly intelligent and motivated people has its drawbacks. One of them is that people here tend to be really good at rationalizing whatever they want to do. You’ve heard the saying, “people make decisions emotionally first, then they make up reasons to justify their emotional decision.” If you’ve ever seen how insanely clever the average cigarette smoker can be when rationalizing his smoking, just imagine a bunch of smokers with 160 IQs in the same room all trying to rationalize different things. Some of the designs people come up with are so insanely complex that only a person from Microsoft could dream them up. And when asked why they didn’t use a simpler design, they can invent reasons why this particular problem was SO unique that it deserved such drastic measures. We hire people specifically for creativity, so it’s no surprise that people are so creative in defending their designs. This is probably why the culture at Microsoft is so confrontational. There is just no way to get to the bottom of a disagreement in time to ship unless you lock everyone in a room and “discuss” for a few hours. Of course, if you let the guy write his entire data loader in Perl instead of running through IRowsetFastload, he’s going to be more motivated to prove himself right, and maybe that is a better outcome than having him use the most appropriate technique. And no developer wants to typecast himself by only doing easy, boring stuff. In fact, trade-offs like this happen all the time. On the whole, I would say that Microsoft is orders of magnitude more pragmatic about doing things the simplest way possible than the recent Open/FSF “movements” (I had an OSS advocate recently tell me that TeX was a suitable document processing software for most consumers.) On the other hand, Microsoft tends to do things the hard way a bit more than most of our dot-com customers. And most Microsoft stuff is way more complicated than the work of Postel, Kantor, and the others who I feel best represent the true roots of any collaborative development movement.