Eric Brechner
August, 2011
ISBN: 978-0735661707
If you wonder what it's like to work for Microsoft ... read this book.
If you need solid, practical advice and council to understand and fix your own organizations software development issues ... read this book.
But if you're a long time veteran of your own corporate code wars and you still have PTSD about it ... ummm ... maybe reading this book will bring on a panic attack. I'm one of those guys. It had me ready to jump off a building.
Eric Brechner - using the catchy pseudonym I. M. Wright - wrote a column about Microsoft and for internal Microsoft reading over the eight years when the .NET software that has consumed the lives of programmers everywhere was being written. Reading this book is like reading your wife's / husband's diary from when you were just dating. One of the things you will get out of it is a much better understanding of Microsoft's internal language, the way they're organized, and why things happen they way they do at Microsoft.
Don't get me wrong. This isn't a tell-all book of dark secrets. Brechner likes Microsoft - a lot - and he still works there. (In a different job now.) Some of the columns are a passionate defense of Microsoft and the way they do business. But others are a stinging criticism of practices and policies that Brechner thought were wrong (and might need fixing at your company). They were intended to be controversial and opinionated at the time and they still are.
(Not to toot too loudly, but I would claim that I'm the same way. I like Microsoft too. But some of my columns and articles here are all about things they have done that I think are just plain stupid. Like pulling the rug out from under VB6 and failing to provide a workable .NET development environment for Office. Like Brechner, one goal I have in writing my criticisms is the small hope that it might be a tiny push in helping Microsoft avoid the oblivion that has doomed so many other great companies. One difference is that I worry that Steve Ballmer, CEO throughout the period covered by this book, is leading the company in some of the wrong directions. I get the sense that Brechner would never say that.)
The column about Microsoft rival Google is a great example of a passionate defense of Microsoft:
"Perhaps I'm ignorant, but Google's attempt to compete with Microsoft is pathetic."
C'mon Eric! Don't hold back. Tell us what you really think.
But he can be pretty hard on Microsoft too.
"... most managers are tragically ignorant of how to recognize their employees or truly why they should."
As these quotes show, Brechner's style is street-level engineering and he talks the language of the cubicle. It's not intended to be funny, but sometimes it is anyway.
"If you are a manager and you tell your team, 'Hey, I've got a great idea,' and they look back at you, seemingly saying, 'Does it involve tying yourself to a tractor and driving off a bridge?' then you might be rancid."
The best part of the book is the insightful opinions of I. M. Wright about software development, but be clear about what it's not. It's not a technical book about how to implement the many techniques, metholodologies and best practices that are discussed. I. M. Wright is more than happy to share his outrageous opinions about Agile Development with you. But he never really discusses what it is. (As I. M. Wright might say, "That's your problem. You figure it out.")
Although it is a reprinting of eight years of columns, Brechner has done a lot to bring it up to date - with frequent "Eric Aside" boxes to explain things you might not know ("What is dogfooding?" for example. It's using beta code for their own internal work. Bill Gates used to say, "At Microsoft, we eat our own dogfood."), to bring the text up to date with current developments, or to explain what he really meant when he wrote the incendiary stuff in the column. He's also organized it into chapters with columns covering similar topics from the software development process to the software business. And a handy index is included.
The best way to use this book would probably be to treat it like an experienced friend that you can discuss your job with.
"I found out that we're going to use Scrum in our next project today. What's up with that? Should I be worried?"
I. M. Wright reassures you that, "Scrum is the closest Agile method to what we've been doing internally for years."
And I would not be doing my own readers the service they deserve (Brechner is, correctly, a big fan of placing a lot of emphasis on the welfare of customers.) if I did not note that, if you want to save the cost of the book, you can always scoot on over to Brechner's blog at Microsoft and get nearly all of what is in the book.
Or ... you can just treat it like a great read.
