From Microsoft to Google and back to MS
Sergey Solyanik has an interesting post on his blog on his experience working for Google and why he decided to come back. Its a good read on the perspective of an insider. Prominent in the post is the points he highlights on how Microsoft provides a clear career path and how at Google the emphasis is on 'coolness' rather than reliability.
An excerpt from the blog post
Google software business is divided between producing the "eye candy" – web properties that are designed to amuse and attract people – and the infrastructure required to support them.
Some of the web properties are useful (some extremely useful – search), but most of them primarily help people waste time online (blogger, youtube, orkut, etc).
All of them are free, and it's anyone's guess how many people would actually pay, say $5 per month to use Gmail. For me, this really does make the project less interesting if people are not willing to pay for it.
This orientation towards cool, but not necessarilly useful or essential software really affects the way the software engineering is done. Everything is pretty much run by the engineering – PMs and testers are conspicuously absent from the process. While they do exist in theory, there are too few of them to matter.
On one hand, there are beneficial effects – it is easy to ship software quickly. I've shipped 3 major features (a lot of spell checker and other stuff in the latest Gmail release, multi-user chat in Gmail, and road traffic incidents in Google Maps), and was busy at work on my fourth project in just a year. You can turn really quickly when you don't have to build consensus between 3 disciplines as you do at Microsoft!
I think this reflects only on one perspective of a developer. There are many out there who would probably love to code some cool stuff than essentially work on code that results in monetary gains.
