If Pete, the fictional character, did indeed work on the TCP/IP stack, Visual Studio and Bing ... it would be pretty easy to identify whom this person is, which would make Marcelo Calbucci an asshole for publishing this, as Pete could get into trouble.
On the other hand if these deliverables were made-up / picked at random, then the story holds no value, because the context of such anecdotes is everything. Like in this case we are led to believe that Pete doesn't have the chops to work for a startup because he supposedly hasn't worked on small and agile teams delivering products straight to customers.
But I've got news for you, even inside big corporations, there are small teams that struggle to innovate and appeal to customers without much support (or control) from their peers.
And if somebody can do it inside a corporation where they have to struggle not only for winning the hearts and minds of customers, but also with internal politics, then that somebody is a lot more valuable than people that worked in startups for their whole carrier doing yet another vertical social network or shopping cart.
Let's imagine he worked, instead, on the SMB stack, Office and Hotmail. Or DAV integration into Explorer, SQL Server and Dynamics.
I can come up with many 3-sets of Microsoft products roughly in the same areas as Calbucci did.
OTOH, once about every 6 months or so someone from Microsoft recruiting calls me. At first, I told them right away I'm not interested (I had enough contact with MS in the late 90's). Now I just let them go on. It usually takes them a couple weeks to google my name and conclude I wouldn't be a good fit.
You are missing the point - the number of Microsoft employees who worked on those 3 projects, or any 3 projects, in the past 10 years is likely very low, considering the thousands of other projects active in the same timeframe.
On the other hand if these deliverables were made-up / picked at random, then the story holds no value, because the context of such anecdotes is everything. Like in this case we are led to believe that Pete doesn't have the chops to work for a startup because he supposedly hasn't worked on small and agile teams delivering products straight to customers.
But I've got news for you, even inside big corporations, there are small teams that struggle to innovate and appeal to customers without much support (or control) from their peers.
And if somebody can do it inside a corporation where they have to struggle not only for winning the hearts and minds of customers, but also with internal politics, then that somebody is a lot more valuable than people that worked in startups for their whole carrier doing yet another vertical social network or shopping cart.