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Tuesday, Nov 24, 2009
A programmer's account of life at the evil empire is surprisingly un-Borg-like.
Feb 8, 2002 | The first things readers should know about "Proudly Serving My Corporate Masters," Adam Barr's account of his 10 years as a Microsoft programmer are a) he thinks the company got a raw deal from the Department of Justice, and b) he is pro-Linux.
That juxtaposition, which one would not automatically associate with the words "Microsoft programmer," is enough by itself to establish Barr's bona fides. A major reason so many people look askance at Microsoft is that so often its public representatives are feeding us a patent line of bullshit. But reading Barr, one never feels that he is making an argument purely to serve Microsoft's interests. We can disagree with him if we want, but we can't fault his sincerity or honesty. His willingness to flout the corporate party line on the pros and cons of open-source software makes his comments on the antitrust trial all the more believable.
Even more useful, Barr's account reminds kneejerk anti-Microsoftians not to reach for the cross and garlic when they hear the words "Microsoft programmer" -- as if simply being employed by Bill Gates automatically transforms one into an evil minion of the Dark Lord.
Programmers, regardless of who they work for, are defined by their willingness to submerge themselves in the arcane intricacies of code -- and there is a commonality to the resulting mind-set that often transcends whether they are working on proprietary code or free software, whether they consider themselves a hacker or a software engineer. Which is not to say that a Richard Stallman would ever be happy debugging Windows XP, but just to observe that there's more linking a Redmond developer together with, say, an Apache coder, than keeping them apart.
Proudly Serving My Corporate Masters
Adam Barr
Writers Club Press
342 pages
I realized this for the first time when I talked to a program manager for Microsoft's IIS Web server software four years ago -- he told me the Apache coders represented the "heart and soul" of the Internet. The problem is, Microsoft PR rarely let me get to the programmers -- and even that IIS program manager didn't want his name to be used. So instead I usually found myself seething as I listened to a flack tell me things that were so obviously self-serving as to be objectively insulting.
This is not the book to read if you want the scoop on Bill Gates, or insight on how to be a mover and shaker at Microsoft. As Barr writes, "I was never interviewed for any magazine articles, never had a press release mention my accomplishments, never participated in a meeting with Bill Gates." Nor is "Proudly Serving My Corporate Masters" the most eloquently written book about computing; it is not in a class, say, with Tracy Kidder's "The Soul of a New Machine" -- a book that Barr quotes several times. There are also some structural flaws -- his book bounces around from point to point across both time and space, with no clear narrative flow or overarching argument linking everything together.
But it is a heartfelt account of what it was like to be a programmer at Microsoft over an action-packed decade. Barr's detailed accounts of how complex software programs are constructed, and the various problems that plague programming, will strike a chord with anyone who is interested in technology and shine a light on the internal workings of Microsoft that is refreshingly different from the typical paean (or jeremiad) bestowed on the company by the press or business school academics.
"Proudly Serving" also has some acute observations as to what Microsoft has done right, and wrong, over the years. If there's an agenda, it is straightforward: Microsoft's success isn't the result of foul play or bullying but of hiring strong people and successfully evangelizing its standards and software.
And on both those counts, Barr is worried. Microsoft is no longer, he says, the "cool place where every college senior wants to work," yet its requirements for quality hires are ever-growing. And on the evangelization level, new challengers like Linux are making a case for themselves that poses a real threat.
