Two years ago today, I started Microsoft Windows Azure as an intern, in the very same team I joined right after college and I am working for last 8 months.

I decided to summarize a few points I learned so far in this job during last 8 months. This may sound like the way things work are crappy, it is not. I learned that one will see this sort of problems in all large scale companies. Most of them are not specific to Microsoft at all. Every company has its own problems. I am not saying that I am unhappy and not complaining. These are purely a few lessons I was not aware of in the college (expectations vs reality sort of article). Read on:

  • Expect no documentation in corporations. I have seen the knowledge inside the company is mostly transferred by talking and hands-on sessions. Some parts of knowledge base generated are only emailed and not saved anywhere permanent. This is not how the information flows in the digital world. There are certain people, if they got hit by a bus, nobody can pick up their work or code. And it is okay. If this would have been my own company there would be tons of wiki pages.

  • It is not what you do, it is what you sell. You can spend days making your codebase a better place, writing more robust code and fix others’ mistakes. As long as it does not have a big business impact and you can’t ship it, it means practically nothing. Nobody will appreciate you for fixing styling or architectural issues in their core, in fact they may get offended. That’s not something I realized when I was a student.

  • Not everybody is passionate for engineering. You don’t always work with people passionate for creating wonderful software. Mostly, people have other things to do (e.g. family and kids) and writing better code is not a priority for the most. And it is okay. I learned not to expect enthusiasm from everybody.

  • 2-3 hours of coding a day is great. Before taking the job, I was able to code 8-10 hours a day on my personal projects. Somehow in this environment it is almost impossible to get 2 hours straight of coding for me. I spend most of my time trying to figure out how others’ uncommented/undocumented code work, debugging strange things and attending daily meetings. Apparently it’s not just me and there can be days no single commits are pushed to the source control in a team. And it is okay.

  • Not giving back to the public domain is a norm. I haven’t met almost any bloggers or open source developers in my organization dedicating some of their time to give back to the community. Everybody loves finding Stack Overflow answers on search results, but nobody contributes those answers. I can understand that.

  • The world outside is not known here a lot. I bet you’re reading what sort of latest technologies and tools are out on blogs, Reddit or Hacker News every day. It’s not common here. I am surprised that no one I met in Windows Azure team heard about Heroku or Rackspace, which are direct competitors. That’s acceptable, not everybody has to know these.

  • It is all about getting shit done in corporations. If your manager asks a button there doing that, nobody cares what sort of mess you created. As long as that functionality is ready, it is okay and can always be fixed later. (I haven’t seen that ever happened, yet.) In college, I learned code quality is as important as the result, turned out wrong.

  • Copy-pasting code can be okay. If somebody sees you doing this outside the corporations, you’ll probably get punched in the face. I’ve seen source files copy pasted across projects. As long as it gets shit done (described above) no one cares if you produced unmaintainable code.

  • Code reviews can be skipped, for the sake of agility. It’s part of the culture in my team, if you are messing with somebody else’s code, you’ll send code reviews. Otherwise it is usually not done and you may wait a lot of time and after a lot of pings to draw some attention, maybe somebody will respond.

  • Latest software, meh. Not everybody is fond of latest versions here. Almost 90% of my colleagues use older versions of Office, Windows, Visual Studio and .NET Framework. There is a common belief that newer versions will break existing workflows. This might be the same reason why some enterprises still run all their software on Java 1.3-1.5. So, I learned not to expect latest software on environments.

  • Your specialties usually do not matter. Thousands get hired every year out of college and usually randomly assigned to a team (which you can’t change for 1.5 years). It does not matter whether you have mastered MongoDB, created iOS apps, been an Apache committer, created your own networking library, designed user interfaces or bootstrapped your own startup. (Don’t worry, I’m none of these.) You are hired to do get something needed done. I was not expecting that. It could be hard to find a position in corporations matches what you love to do.

  • At the end, you are working for your manager’s and their managers’ paychecks. I was not aware of this fact in college.

(This post made it to the top of Hacker News and /r/programming. Thanks everyone for comments and support. There are over 1,000 comments on HN, Reddit and below, I did not have a chance to read them all, sorry if I missed yours.)