The one thing I remember distinctly about Balwani (although I can't remember where from) was him boasting about the 100k LOC he wrote while at Microsoft. Like it was supposed to be a badge of honour or indicator of intellectual prowess.
I worked for Microsoft for 4 years - this is a HUGE surprise to me. Most of the people I know who worked in his orgs were proud to work under his direction.
Interesting, the story I've heard from various Senior Engineers is that Microsoft poached him by offering him a ton of money. Crazy to think they all repeated a tech urban legend I guess
I worked with the man for years in the Xbox Advanced Technology Group. Amazing individual. When he left the team, I conducted my own exit interview so I could learn from him, and walked away with pages and pages of insights on growing my own career and becoming a subject matter expert.
He was on my interview loop at ATG, and I recount it as my favorite interview of all time. He pointed to a circuit diagram poster, and said to me "You have to write a game for that, what design considerations should you be aware of?"
A bit out of my league, but I identified the important aspects (multicore/hyperthreaded design, small L0/L1 cache and impacts to mispedictions, etc.) and spoke to what I could and where my uncertainties lay. Afterwards he gave up the rest of the time to let me ask questions about the team.
One XFest he stood on stage giving a Powerpoint presentation on debugging and multithreaded concerns. An animation was slow, and he broke into it and started debugging Powperpoint live to demonstrate some of his techniques. A legend.
A huge loss to Microsoft when we stepped away. I did and do hope him the best!
This is true, strictly speaking. But (also strictly speaking) he was an engineer
> Nadella attended the Hyderabad Public School, Begumpet[7] before receiving a bachelor's in electrical engineering[8] from the Manipal Institute of Technology (then part of Mangalore University) in Karnataka in 1988.[9][10] Nadella subsequently traveled to the U.S. to study for an M.S. in computer science at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee,[11][12] receiving his degree in 1990.[13] Later, he received an MBA from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business.[14]
Hmm maybe I can see Rajesh's LinkedIn when I log in because I'm some number of degrees away from him. Or maybe just logging in is enough. Anyway, you can search the web for him if you want to see that he has indeed been at Microsoft a long time (nearly 25 years now).
As for Eric Lawrence, if Eric gets quoted a lot that's probably because he wrote the first versions of Fiddler, the debugging localhost proxy that many Windows developers use, so tech journalists that specialize in Microsoft have heard of him through their developer acquaintances. Plus his Microsoft email address is easy to guess: [his Twitter username]@microsoft.com
Eric left Microsoft after over 10 years, went through 2 companies including Google, then came back within about 6 years. I consider him closer to Microsoft in outlook than Google, though one could plausibly disagree given how rude he was about his old team's products IE and Edge while he was away.
As for "Principal Program Manager," that being misleading about scope is news to me, and if it is, that's on the journalists to clarify, because this kind of title is commonplace and implies very little. At any tech company "Program/Product Manager" is not necessarily a people leader. "Principal" doesn't change this. "Principal" at Microsoft and other tech companies is just a rank like "Senior," albeit a hard-to-earn and usually well-deserved one. If I say I am a "Principal Product Manager, HotTechCo BlahBlah," I don't think anyone in the industry will assume I run the entirety of that product.
TL;DR, she's really taking the advocacy thing seriously: apparently Microsoft is amazing (and there's a subtle digestion that Pivotal doesn't pay as well, and maybe isn't a interesting)
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