Comment by markus_zhang
2 days ago
“One team we literally had to draw straws once to determine who was going to learn how to write native code for Windows.”
Jesus, you have tons of people who are willing to do that, even now. Microsoft just don’t care to hire from non-target schools, or ordinary professionals and train them —- sure the reason is, people believe that you cannot improve mediocrity, which I don’t believe so.
On a completely different page, most of the generals and advisors and high level bureaucrats of the first Emperor of the Han dynasty came from exactly one county — the county of Pei. But in peaceful time they are just “ordinary people”.
> Jesus, you have tons of people who are willing to do that, even now. Microsoft just don’t care to hire from non-target schools, or ordinary professionals and train them
Microsoft was never elitist about what schools they hired from. When I was there almost anyone who applied from an accredited CS program got at least a phone screen.
But no one in their right mind, in 2012 (when this particular incident happened!), would voluntarily pick up native Windows development skills. It was obvious even then that it was a dead end market.
The number of companies hiring native Windows developers is tiny, and the pay isn't all that good.
It isn't quite COBOL bad, but it isn't a growing market.
I don’t know, I’d love to do the job. Where do I sign up? I know some C from my OS projects, a bit of C++ with my SDL game projects, nothing professional. I also write a lot of Python and SQL. I’m in Canada. Don’t care about salary as long as it’s kinda stable and above 90k CAD, that’s about 1/3 salary cut. QT is good too, I did one project.
I actually tried my luck on LinkedIn but without answer, so would love to get a reference somewhere. If people say my side projects are not enough, which is probably true, I can focus on some Win32 programming for 3 months and see if it works.
But if they only hire greybeards who bagged 20 years of experience then I’m out of luck.
Of course the ideal job is some system programmers job, but I understand that’s too hard, so a notch above is the next good option.
Every large company is doing layoffs right now. Getting an interview 10 years was your best bet. Heck even in 2022 I heard they were brining everyone in for interviews.