Comment by Someone1234
1 day ago
I know blaming everything on LLMs is in vogue right now; but this is much more to do with Microsoft very publically firing the QA department[0][1] as a cost savings measure and claiming developers will do their own QA (long before LLMs were on the scene). It started in 2014 and the trickle never stopped.
Microsoft has a cultural problem; it went from an "engineers" company to an MBA directed one, trying to maximize short-term shareholder value at the cost of long-term company reputation/growth. It is very common and typical of US Corporate culture today, and catastrophic in the long-run.
[0] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/08/how-m...
[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/business/microsoft-expected-...
That was in 2014, doesn't explain the timing of these increasingly common broken patches. I had never gotten as many calls over Windows Update messes from my non-techie family as last year.
The lack of QA isn't felt right away. They are accumulating tech debt, which mean problems are becoming more frequent and harder to solve over time until they fix the fundamentals, and it doesn't feel like they intend to.
1. "isn't felt right away" then what's the correct timescale? Is it 2 years? Is it 5 years? We are looking at 10 years now. Do you have any studies on this that you can quote to prove that at Microsoft scale and for the product they develop, 10 years is the time when things go bad?
2. "becoming more frequent and harder to solve" how much more frequent and harder? Things works pretty fine during Windows 10, but these days I run into a bug in Windows 11 every other day myself.
It would be a surprise if this has more to do with QA from 2014 than vibe coding.
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Windows 10 managed to mature in a way that 11 still hasn't over four years in, though.
Oh boy, in 2015 Windows 10 was released, and it was extremely broken, including endless reboot loops, vanishing start menu and icons, system freezes, app crashes, file explorer crashes, broken hardware encryption and many broken drivers – so really it was about the same as now. Embracing LLMs and vibe-coding all around made this even worse of course
Oh, Yes. Windows 10 had big issues on arrival. But this is also selective Amnesia. The Windows 8 UI was nearly unusable on release. Windows Vista was so legendarily broken on release, that even after it became stable, the majority of technical users refused to give up Windows XP went straight to Windows 7. And even Windows XP that everybody fondly remembers was quite a mess when it came out. Most home users migrated from the Windows 9x line of Windows, so they probably didn't notice the instability so much, but a lot of power users who were already on Windows 2000 held up until SP2 came out. And let's not even talk about Windows ME.
The only major Windows version release that wasn't just a point upgrade that was stable in the last century was Window 7 and even then some people would argue this was just a point upgrade for Windows Vista.
I'm sure that Microsoft greatly reducing their dedicated QA engineers in 2014 had at least some lasting impact on quality, but I don't think we can blame it on bad releases or bungled Patch Tuesdays without better evidence. Windows 10 is not a good proof for, consider Vista had 10 times as many issues with fully staffed QA teams in the building.
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Just because it’s getting worse faster doesn’t mean that it wasn’t getting worse before
The arstechnica article was very good as a history of waterfall v sprint using MS as a case study. However the firing the QA department narrative is not supported:
Prior to these cuts, Testing/QA staff was in some parts of the company outnumbering developers by about two to one. Afterward, the ratio was closer to one to one. As a precursor to these layoffs and the shifting roles of development and testing, the OSG renamed its test team to “Quality.”
Two QA per dev?? That seems ginormous to me. What am I missing about the narrative about evil corp sending all of QA packing, that seems not supported here?
The second, Reuters article seems like it's saying something different than the QA firing narrative - it seems to talk about Nokia acquisition specifically and a smattering of layoffs.
Not supporting layoffs or eliminating QA, and I'm deeply annoyed at Windows 11. I just don't see these as supportive of the narrative here that QA is kaput.
> Two QA per dev?? That seems ginormous to me. What am I missing about the narrative about evil corp sending all of QA packing, that seems not supported here?
I think you're underestimating the QA burden for large parts of the company. When I worked in payments at MS, the ratio of QA to dev after the cuts was probably on the order of dozens to one, if not a hundred or more once you threw in Xbox/Windows/etc accessibility QA from across the organization and all the other people like lawyers involved in handling over a hundred jurisdictions. I was little more than a frontend line cook and even I had three QA people reporting directly to me; two of them helping write tests so they ostensibly should have been automating themselves out of a job.
There is a lot of manual testing when you have a complex system like that where not everything can be properly stubbed out, emulated, or replaced with a test API key. They also have to be kept around to help with painful bursty periods (for us it was supporting PSD2, SCA, or 3DS2, forgot which). Payments is obviously an outlier because there is a lot of legal compliance, but the people I knew in Cloud/Windows also had lots of QA per dev.
I wouldn't be surprised if the degradation in feature parity of newer Windows software was a result of this loss of QA. Without the QA, the developers have to be less ambitious in what they implement in order to meet release schedules, and since they don't have experienced QA they can't modify the older codebases at all to extend them.
Remember also, they were doing an enormous amount of testing with third-party devices and software*. Which is what seems to keep blowing up most spectacularly. Even if something works on 99.9% of computers, with a billion installs that's a few million dissatisfied customers
* Stories like this: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20250610-00/?p=11...
In writing life critical systems like the Space Shuttle's operating system, effectively 99.9% of all work is QA.
MS had the dominant operating system in the world, and keeping its userbase and its ~monopoly dividend would have been more profitable as a business than doing... everything it's done in the past twenty years. Selling software that all the people use all the time just has a lot less opportunity for growth than making new software, according to Investor Brain.
>In writing life critical systems like the Space Shuttle's operating system, effectively 99.9% of all work is QA.
Similar in automotive safety related systems like brake, steering or powertrain.
Few is writing function code to how much is requirement engineering, FMEA and writing tests and testing.
The Windows ecosystem is insanely complex. And they supported it, because of the focus on QA and testing the company adopted 20 years ago after the Blaster worm.
I have a few pretty awesome teams stuck managing windows. They find bugs all of the time. The process of fixing them now practically requires a detachment of druids and Stonehenge to track where in the windows/lunar/solar cycles we are and how to deal with the bullshit & roadblocks the support and product teams throw up. If you fall for their tricks, you’ll miss the feature window… no fix for 18 months.
It used to be much easier as a customer in ye olden times, and I never felt that the counterparty at Microsoft was miserable or getting punished for doing their jobs. We feel that now as customers. You didn’t establish relationships with engineers like with other vendors, but there was a different vibe.
The focus of the company moved in to Azure, service ops, etc.
I worked in the windows org around that time and the Dev/QA ratio there was closer to 1:1. QA did both manual testing and much of the automation, quality gates, and did regression testing against older versions of windows. Given the complexity of the product is is fairly easy for an inexpensive change to require an expensive test effort.
I had a QA engineer who gave me feedback on designs, great code reviews, and who wrote tests that I could also run.
It was a partnership. I miss it.
And honestly, that person deserves the same pay grade as a "normal" engineer. But sadly, most QA staff are underpaid and somewhat even an inferior class.
Instead, if the QA role was the dominant and better paid title, you'd immediately see an improvement in that partnership. I don't think that you need subordinate staff in the QA role at all.
And for what its worth, I'm that guy. I am a strong technical software developer, but I would much rather test and poke at code bases, finding problems, working with a "lead" developer, and showing them all their quality mistakes. If I could have that role at my pay grade, I'd be there.
Quality testers are so extremely valuable.
In the chip design world, 2:1 for design verification to design is on the low end of normal.
Some organizations have gone as low as 1:1 but that is considered an emergency that must be fixed. It’s so important that designers will be intentionally underworked if there are not enough validation engineers on staff.
When you can’t fix bugs in the field, quality is important.
> Two QA per dev??
QA is a lot cheaper than dev. If your goal is to make quality software* on a fixed budget, you want to be QA-heavy.
* Note: the OS definition of "quality software" drastically differs from your average app.
> QA is a lot cheaper than dev.
QA is definitely one of those "you get what you pay for". A dev just bangs out code on what is assumed "happy path" which means the user uses it as the dev expects. QA has to some how think of all the inane ways that a user will actually try using the thing knowing that not all users are technically savvy at all. They are actively trying to break things not just feed in clean data to produce expected outputs. Let's face it, that's exactly what devs do when they "test". They are specifically trying to get unexpected outputs to see how things behave. At least, good QA teams do.
I worked with a QA person who I actively told anyone that listened that the specific QA person deserved a higher salary than I did as the dev. They caught some crazy situations where product was much better after fixing.
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I feel that not only should QA staff outnumber developers, but QA staff should have access to development time to design and improve QA tooling.
If you're doing an OS right, the quality is the product. I think MacOS prior to the launch of the iPhone would be the gold standard the kind of product design I'm talking about. At that time they were running circles around Windows XP/7 in terms of new features. They were actually selling the new OSes and folks were happy to pay for each roughly annual upgrade. Often the same hardware got faster with the newer OS.
Lately Microsoft and Apple are racing to the bottom, it seems.
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Important to note MS used to have 2 types of QA:
1. SDETs (software design engineer in test) - same pay scale and hiring requirements as SDEs, they did mostly automated testing and wrote automated test harnesses.
2. STEs (software test engineer) - lower pay scale, manual testing, often vendors. MS used to have lots of STE ftes but they fired most of them in the early 2000s (before I joined in 2007).
An ideal ratio of SDETs to SDEs was 1 to 1, but then SDET teams would have STE vendors doing grunt work.
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2 people doing QA per dev seems insane even if it’s a lot cheaper. M$ is hardly know for being obsessed with quality, they’d rather have 2 sales per dev (sales is even cheaper, basically pays for itself)
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> Two QA per dev?? That seems ginormous to me.
The only person I heard was writing perfect code was Donald Knuth. And even he had bugs in its code.
> I know blaming everything on LLMs is in vogue right now; but this is much more to do with Microsoft very publically firing the QA department
A move no doubt encouraged by c-suites to demonstrate how effective LLMs are in the budget tally.
There's a great talk that explains how code structure ends up looking like the org chart, and every subsequent organization chart layered on top producing spaghetti code. Windows is now old and full of spaghetti code. Then Microsoft layed off all the expensive seniors who knew the stack and replaced them with cheaper diverse and outsourced staff. Then the people who can't maintain the code use AI and just ship it without any testing.
edit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_law
According to Microsoft's top brass, Copilot (one of them) should easily be able to handle QA. So OP's point remains.
There seems to be a lot of internal factionalism that's showing up in the final product. I think this is a chromic disease that flares up every couple of years and is then clamped down on... but for whatever reason the lessons are never learned for long.
The shift from an engineer-led corporation to an MBA-led corporation has brought Boeing close to the brink of collapse.
It has been an MBA company for most of its life. If I had to draw the line, IMO seems Windows 2000 was the last engineer-driven product, and by then it had already developed predatory habits.
There's always Windows Server...
Let's hope for the catastrophic scenario. A world without Microsoft.. no telemetry or backdoors. Please continue on this track to disaster!
Accelerationists seem to think the world after a vacuum is going to be some utopia
I think more competition is better than less
More competitionis better. If you take the market share and revenue off the table and spread that around in a competitive market you'd be in a much more interesting spot with respect to technology advancements. Instead we continue to stagnate with bullshit like Windows 10 --> Windows 11. Windows 11 was never supposed to exist, but $$$$$. There's literally nothing worth paying for in that upgrade. But Microsoft knows it can milk businesses and schools out of ridiculous profits for, essentially, the same garbage and also collude with hardware manufacturers to sell more PCs.
[0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/gordonkelly/2015/05/08/microsof...
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It's not only MS with an interest in maintaining these misfeatures in consumer tech. It's not even only private industry.
Indeed! I'll wait on the penguin or fruit side with some pop-corn and see where the things are going to.
Seems like the fruit vendor is on the same train as MS if not just a few cars behind yet still arriving at the same destination.
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>A world without Microsoft.. no telemetry or backdoors.
thank god microsoft is the only entity on the planet that uses telemetry or violates privacy. get rid of them and we're in a new age!
I think all companies eventually mutate into a MBA company. For MSFT there was a culture from very early that PMs should lead the project instead of engineers. I read in "Showstoppers" that Cutler was very against of the idea and he pushed back. So that means even in the late 80s MSFT was already a MBA-centered company. The only reason that it has not degraded yet, was because it has not achieved the monopoly position. Once it does it started to chew on its success and quickly degraded into a quasi-feudal economic entity.
> Microsoft has a cultural problem; it went from an "engineers" company to an MBA directed one
I don’t think this is just Microsoft. Few engineers and visionaries that started these big companies are still at the helm.
It’s an opportunity for other companies to take over imo.
> It’s an opportunity for other companies to take over imo.
This is a feeling commonly shared here.
I'd like to point out that IBM still dominates the large, billion-dollars worth mainframe market, almost 70 years after it invented it, despite continuous mismanagement for probably 40 years.
Microsoft dominates the PC market 40 years after taking it over with MS-DOS, and despite multiple debacles (Windows Millennium, Windows Vista, now Win 11, probably others I'm forgetting).
Microsoft dominates the office suite market 30+ years after taking it over with MS Office, despite some huge controversies (the Ribbon still annoys nerds, to this day). More than that, Microsoft has leverage MS Office to become the close second cloud provider after AWS despite starting far behind it.
Google and Apple will probably dominate the smartphone and tablet markets for a long time, after taking over those markets 10+ years ago.
The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent and a company with a massive moat can outlive most of us. I'd actually turn this on its head by saying that assuming a new comer will topple the incumbent "any day now" is the irrational approach to a market.
> I'd like to point out that IBM still dominates the large, billion-dollars worth mainframe market
Companies continue to pay the IBM tax, but the way IBM writes support contracts incentivizes customers to work very hard at moving workloads to Windows/UNIX. IBM is choosing "Better to reign in [mainframe], then serve in [commodity compute]."
(All apologies to John Milton)
You are missing 8.0. When Microsoft in its incomparable wisdom decided we needed a tablet OS in the PC.
So essentially, they need to turn quality around or suffer the thousand cuts of death like Intel?
Although. These companies don't "die" - it's more the consumers end up being abandoned in favour of B2B?
At least we get Visual Studio Code for free
Yeah they baited everyone, blocked Python and C# plugins and then closed down their marketplace to 3rd party editors. Classic EEE tactic.
Some useful tech has come out of the development of VS Code that every other editor has been able to benefit from but I don’t rate it much as an editor any more.
It’s rare for MS to do just the embrace and extend part of EEE, unless Copilot is the latent implementation of ‘extinguish’.
Other than what they're doing to the whole Open Source ecosystem by buying github, stealing all the code for their AI regardless of license, renaming multiple adjacent things to "Github *".
> I know blaming everything on LLMs is in vogue right now; but this is much more to do with Microsoft very publically firing the QA department.
Yes, yes, "agile" everything...
I remember clicking on a perfectly honest button in Azure Dev Ops (Production) and it told me that the button is completed but the actual functionality will be probably delivered in Sprint XY.
No one is blaming LLMs.
Their presence in this situation casts a conspicuous shadow though.
On a contrary note: if LLMs really are that helpful why are QA teams needed? Wouldn't the LLM magically write the best code?
Since LLMs have been shoved down everyone's work schedule, we're seeing more frequent outages. In 2025 2 azure outage. Then aws outage. Last week 2 snowflake outages.
Either LLMs are not the panacea that they're marketed to be or something is deeply wrong in the industry
Why not both? It's not this industry, it's everything. Fuck Jack Welch, fuck the Chicago School.
Yes, it is both. If something is forced top down as a productivity spike then it probably isn't one! I remember back in the days when I had to fight management for using Python for something! It gave us a productivity boost to write our tooling in Python. If LLMs were that great since the start, we would have to fight for them.
Wholeheartedly agree.
I can't wait until we can live in a better era where we look back with collective disgust at the blatant white-collar crime time period that was ushered by Friedman and Welch.
That, plus the current era, feels to me like a massive dog whistle for people who can't read satirical stories like A Modest Proposal without taking them as instructions.
Microsoft fired their QA because at the end of the day, they are beholden to shareholders. And those shareholders want higher profits. And if you want higher profits, you cut costs.
It's not a culture problem. It's a 'being a business' problem, which unfortunately affects all publicly-traded companies.
That’s a cop-out though. Company boards are legally required to act in the best interests of shareholders, and plenty of shareholders would agree that running a business in a sustainable way that can deliver profits over the long term is more in their interests than a business trading its future for some short term profits.
It’s a cultural problem really, where too many people who study business and economics have been taught this idea that it’s a moral necessity that businesses maximise profit for shareholders (to the point where plenty of people even wrongly believe that’s a legal requirement!), but it’s an ideological position that has only caused once great companies to fail and huge damage to our economies.
Shareholders are, on average, not this activist. A CEO can in fact run a public company with a long-term outlook instead of pumping the numbers for just the next quarter.
Is that true? I've heard both sides of this.
Here is a whole movement that I think believes otherwise:
https://votelabor.org/articles/overturning-dodge-v-ford-recl...
On the other hand, I've heard conflicting takes from attorneys in the corporate world.
Are businesses expected to boom and bust? Cost cutting is fine if you don't kill the company in the process.
They know MS isn't going anywhere. Windows is too entrenched, users don't care or have feasible alternatives, for a variety of reasons.
Plus, MS isn't in the OS business. They're in the data/metrics business.
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Microsoft has a cultural problem; it went from an "engineers" company to an MBA directed one
Every simplistic analysis of failing company X uses a hackneyed cliche like this. But in the case of MS, this is completely ridiculous. MS has been renowned for shitty software, since day one. Bill Gates won the 90s software battle based on monopoly, connections and "first feature to market" tactics.
If anything, the heyday of MS quality was the mid 2000s, where it was occasionally lauded for producing good things. But it was never an engineers company (that's Boeing or whoever).