Tuesday, 22 February 2000
.....
As you recall, we covered James Fallows' piece in The Atlantic way back on January 29. That Slashdot is just now catching up with old news is one thing (and not a very remarkable thing at that), but their comments are just amateurish. Ok, that's not particularly remarkable either, but we've got to write about something here.
First of all, they call it a "lengthy piece". Huh. I guess your average Slashdotter has a pretty short attention span, because this was actually a fairly short piece in the magazine -- three or four pages. Granted, it's split into two pages on the web site, so maybe the "lengthy" judgement is based solely on the number of pages you have to load in your browser.
As should be expected, /. concentrates on the "spooky" apects of working for Microsoft. In reality, Fallows wrote a very even-handed, interesting piece that explains how product feature lists are made (lots of meetings but the final decision comes down to a programmer), and who Microsoft is interested in selling to (large organizations, that's where the money is).
All in all, Microserfs are just geeks like anyone else. It doesn't sound like a spooky place to work, except for the fact that you'd be working for Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer. Hmmmm, scratch that, maybe it is a spooky place to work.
See also James Fallows Survives the Belly of the Beast <http://monkeyfist.com/articles/146>
This is Slashdot Catches Up <http://monkeyfist.com/articles/243>