They're not microsoft employees. It's just MS has explicitly recognized them.
There's an irony that the award MS gives to passionate engineers in the .Net community has been completely misunderstood by someone outside of it.
If you want to see a great example of a passionate engineer who's been awarded the MVP, go read a few Rick Strahl blog posts.
Another one was Scott Hanselman, though I believe he joined MS like 10 years ago.
They addmitedly muddy the waters by awarding the MVP to their own employees writing about their new stuff, but even they can be passionate and interesting. Scott Guthrie's time on ASP.Net is a good example.
When you join the MVP program you are an evangelist. You are briefed, you are under NDA and you start to have a very different view that the broader community. Not every MVP is like that, but while I like the content they create I see them seriously disconnected from many .NET developers and actual use cases.
I think that is because product teams at Microsoft more or less expect MVPs to function as evangelist of the things they want to communicate marketing-wise. Originally the program started as recognizing community leaders/technical experts in specific MS technologies, but I feel things got hijacked somewhat along the way. Teams see MVPs as credible voices towards their audience so naturally the tempatation to use them as marketing voice is there.
Add to that the fact that MVPs themselves are passionate about those MS technologies so they for most part do want to repeat marketing line.
I used to be MS MVP, not for developer tech but for it pro side of things, and definitely saw these ”asks” in the messaging the product team did towards us from time to time.
They're not microsoft employees. It's just MS has explicitly recognized them.
There's an irony that the award MS gives to passionate engineers in the .Net community has been completely misunderstood by someone outside of it.
If you want to see a great example of a passionate engineer who's been awarded the MVP, go read a few Rick Strahl blog posts.
Another one was Scott Hanselman, though I believe he joined MS like 10 years ago.
They addmitedly muddy the waters by awarding the MVP to their own employees writing about their new stuff, but even they can be passionate and interesting. Scott Guthrie's time on ASP.Net is a good example.