I. M. Wright’s “Hard Code”

You work on big, important projects that involve many moving parts and many different teams. You work hard to deliver your piece on time and with high quality. No one can claim that you’re the one who held things up. No, it’s always those...

There are two executive planning strategies: go for it all (cut later), and do a few things well (add later). Executives follow the strategy that best reflects their belief system. They use that planning strategy to drive work throughout the product cycle...

After decades as a professional software engineer, working for six different firms (large and small), I can honestly say that Microsoft is by far the best. I can also honestly say that Microsoft is far from perfect. My monthly rants typically focus...

We’re getting into the midyear career discussion period at Microsoft. People do appreciate a career discussion with their manager, but most folks have another topic on their mind—how am I doing? Look, it’s not a mystery—you should...

There are many books and lecture series about creating high-performing teams that work well together, work hard for each other, and produce tremendous results. That’s nice. In real life, you, the manager, don’t get to create high-performing...

Software geeks know that registers fetch data roughly 10 times faster than the L2 cache, 100 times faster than main memory, and more than a million times faster than hard drives. Smart software engineers work hard to keep all the data for their inner...

You’re working on a feature and think there’s an obvious customer improvement to be made. The tester thinks you’re in obvious need of medical attention from a psychiatric professional. She believes the shipped design was fine from the...

The Microsoft Company Meeting was a few weeks ago. If you love the tech status quo inside or outside of Microsoft, seek shelter. How the company operates and how it engages with customers and the markets is about to change. All the signs were there in...

Eric Aside This month I cover a touchy subject—getting a 4 or 5 review rating. Please know that all opinions expressed in this column (and every Hard Code column) are my own and do not represent Microsoft in any official or unofficial capacity...

Last month, I wrote about the value of good program managers (PMs). Some people liked the column (mostly PMs). Some people hated it (folks with bad PMs). However, the most common response was that Microsoft has too many PMs. Can you have too much of a...

Microsoft is one of the few software companies that uses program managers (PMs). PMs, developers, and testers form the infamous engineering triad. Together they prioritize and cost features, triage bugs, and make design decisions. Now that highly agile...

A friend asked me recently about one of his reports. He had a few concerns going into annual review calibration. His employee was a smart, strong, consistent contributor, well beyond entry level and independence (see Level up for reference), but he had...

There are never enough resources to complete our ambitious plans, so Microsoft is constantly hiring help—vendors and contingent staff (CSG). Full-time employees (FTEs) are hired too, but the relationship is different—at least it’s supposed...

A recent flood of build breaks triggered a wave of tool suggestions to plug the cracks in our code. Some argued for faster builds. Some argued for deeper branching. Some argued for a “gauntlet” service that simulates official builds and blocks...

Are you sensing a rush coming as we complete midyear career discussions at Microsoft and head into the stretch toward annual reviews? Worried about keeping up with your peers when you already have far too much to do and far too little time in which to...

To start the new year, my boss gave an all-hands speech to a large group of developers about being an engineer. He equated being an engineer with taking responsibility for quality and using methods that ensure high quality at checkin ( Nailing the nominals...

I was talking with a friend from another Microsoft division. He complained about gridlock on his team because “no one can make a decision.” He lamented, “We discuss issues and come to some conclusions, but rarely get a resolution that...

Tension fills the conference room a few weeks before the Client release. The Client team wasn’t told that the Database team had added a parameter to the AddClient API. The Client broke spectacularly—the latest in a series of miscommunication...

It breaks my heart and sickens my stomach to witness the tremendous productivity and quality gains of Lean Software Development practices at Microsoft: feature crews in Office, scrum teams in Xbox, and improvement teams in SQLServer, to name a few. These...

If you had to choose between hiring an outstanding candidate with only related domain knowledge and a solid candidate with specific domain knowledge, who would you select? At Microsoft, we generally select the outstanding candidate, figuring a talented...

There is one service design flaw that engineers repeat day after day, month after month, year after year. Scalability? Nope, though it’s popular. Security? Happens, but not that frequently. Serviceability? Getting warmer. Give up? Don’t care...

Few Microsoft engineers change positions between mid-May and mid-August—they don’t want a role change to adversely impact their annual performance ratings, which lock around mid-August. Of course, managers shouldn’t allow position changes...

It’s calibration time at Microsoft. Time for managers to rank everyone in your peer group (same discipline, same career stage, same division) into five (and a half) ranges: the top 20 percent (and top 5 percent), the near top 20 percent, the middle...

Not every bug is the same. A bug that frequently freezes an app gets more attention than an extra line of green pixels in a border. An embarrassing typo in a prominent feature is more urgent to fix than an inappropriate exception thrown by a misused API...

I love Microsoft®. We’ve been together happily for many years. If you’ve been in a healthy long-term relationship, then you know what this means—there are things about Microsoft that make me curse, stomp, and spit. I’ve learned...