Outside In

In 2000, every Microsoft employee received a copy of the seminal work, “Inside Out: Microsoft - In Our Own Words“. It's actually a pretty interesting book (well... for a certain audience), with some fantastic photos and stories from the first 25 years (one of my favorite pictures is the 'bearded dudes with glasses' on the table of contents).

I'm probably biased, but one of my favorite stories is on page 57, from a former Exchange Dev lead:

“I was so far away from Bill in the management chain that I crashed. When we were working on Microsoft Mail 3.0, we wanted to get some cook time testing the product against the Xenix Wzmail system on campus. I was working on the Address Book, and in particular the part that allowed you to see the address details for each employee, including who their manager was. This clever developer named Johnny Lee made the Manager field hot so you could double-click on your manager, see his or her details, and then double-click on that person's manager and so on up the management chain. Finally, one of two things would happen -- either you'd reach BillG or the details would fill up the Windows 3.0 stack and you'd crash. So, of course we all tried it and when you crashed, it just confirmed how much of a peon you really were. Clicking up the management chain was such a popular feature that we made it part of the retail product. That is, minus the crash.“

There's a ton of other fun reading in the book, such as sections on what program managers actually do. This has also been described in other places (such as here and here, and certainly many more), but I always enjoy reading how other people describe what I do all day (”So... what is it exactly that you do all day?” ... “I've got people skills!!”)

And it looks like nowadays, you can purchase this book for a whopping $2.20! Probably only interesting to existing and former softies and others who follow the company.