--- title: "Please don't go (work for MS or Google)" url: "https://osherove.com/blog/2008/5/1/please-dont-go-work-for-ms-or-google.md" canonical: "https://osherove.com/blog/2008/5/1/please-dont-go-work-for-ms-or-google.html" published: "2008-05-01T01:24:51" updated: "2008-05-01T01:24:51" tags: [".NET", "General Software Devel..."] author: "Roy Osherove" description: "Um, kids, Joel needs employees. So don't go to MS or Google , please? Seriously, Joel? When was the last *important* thing you've built that didn't rely on some knowledge that came out of one of those two huge…" usage: "Licensed under CC BY 4.0 — reuse, quote and adapt with attribution (Roy Osherove, link to the original page)." license: "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/" --- # Please don't go (work for MS or Google) By Roy Osherove May 1, 2008 In [.NET](https://osherove.com/blog/category/net), [General Software Devel...](https://osherove.com/blog/category/general-software-devel) **Historical article** · Originally published May 1, 2008; technical details may be outdated. Um, kids, [Joel](http://www.joelonsoftware.com/) needs employees. [So don't go to MS or Google](http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2008/05/01.html), please? Seriously, Joel? When was the last \*important\* thing you've built that didn't rely on some knowledge that came out of one of those two huge companies? The nice thing about being an architecture astronaut, is that every once in a while, you solve a real problem while trying to solve a different one. If MS and gogole didn't take on al these huge failing projects, how would the world learn about things like: - Making huge teams scalable (or how \*not\* to) - Creating very scalable architectures - Identity - WS Standards and Security - Parallelism, synchronization - Next generation languages and tools - better tooling for existing languages - Domain specific languages for solving complex and small problems - lots more "little" solutions to many problems People who work there don't work on hopeless projects, they go there to **solve huge technological challenges** that advance our software industry directly or indirectly by letting us know what the limits are in given contexts: - A team of X size becomes a big problem if you manage it wrong (see "[Vista Start menu Fiasco](http://moishelettvin.blogspot.com/2006/11/windows-shutdown-crapfest.html)") - [Agile can work](http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2006/09/good-agile-bad-agile_27.html) on larger teams (as long as you split them to smaller teams!) while people do other things as well - Integrating winforms in the browser can lead to [really bad things](http://www.aivosto.com/visdev/vdmbvis58.html), but [alternatives](http://silverlight.net/) will be found - How do you support [X millions of transactions per minute](http://www.mesh.com/)? ## More in .NET [All posts in .NET](https://osherove.com/blog/category/net) - May 10, 2008 ### [NullObject.For - As simple as it gets, but no simpler](https://osherove.com/blog/2008/5/10/nullobjectforlttgt-as-simple-as-it-gets-but-no-simpler.html) - May 6, 2008 ### [Introducing LINQ To Regex](https://osherove.com/blog/2008/5/6/introducing-linq-to-regex.html) - Apr 29, 2008 ### [Don't miss out on Spec#](https://osherove.com/blog/2008/4/29/dont-miss-out-on-spec.html) - Apr 24, 2008 ### [Testing XML serialization attributes](https://osherove.com/blog/2008/4/24/testing-xml-serialization-attributes.html) --- ## About the author **Roy Osherove**: Senior Solutions Architect at AWS working on AI for production and AI-driven development; author of The Art of Unit Testing and Elastic Leadership, with about 20 years of consulting and training on unit testing, TDD, team leadership and continuous delivery. ### Sites - [RobotPaper](https://robotpaper.ai/): This blog: AI patterns and anti-patterns, AI and coding agents, and engineering leadership. - [osherove.com](https://osherove.com): Roy's personal site. Author of The Art of Unit Testing and Elastic Leadership; consulting and training on unit testing, TDD, team leadership and continuous delivery, plus about 20 years of blog posts. - [The Art of Unit Testing](https://www.artofunittesting.com): The Art of Unit Testing, 3rd Edition (Manning): readable, maintainable, trustworthy unit tests, plus TDD workshops in C#, JavaScript, Java and Kotlin. - [5whys.com](https://www.5whys.com): Roy's writing on software team leadership: self-organizing teams, surviving chaos, learning mode and the Elastic Leadership model. - [Pipeline Driven](https://pipelinedriven.org): Continuous delivery and DevOps practices: build patterns, pipeline-friendly testing, DevOps metrics and enterprise DevOps. - [Elastic Leadership](https://www.elasticleadership.com): Elastic Leadership, Roy's framework for software team leaders (survival, learning and self-organizing modes). ### Social - X: https://x.com/royosherove - LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/osherove/ ### Contact - Contact form: https://forms.gle/jQSx5KoXvrVA1JCK7 ### License Licensed under CC BY 4.0 — reuse, quote and adapt with attribution (Roy Osherove, link to the original page). License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/