Comment by asveikau

I was at Microsoft for a few years. I think some amount of blame has to go to hiring quality declining over the years.

I wrote a bit about this in an old comment:

> They have a lot of staff turnover too, and each generation of new SDE has less of a clue how the old stuff worked. So when they're tasked with replacing the old stuff, they don't understand what it does, and the rewrite ends up doing less.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46472300

Also, a little bit after I left, they eliminated the SDET role. I have memories of encountering many SDETs who didn't know what they were doing. But the good ones kept the developers honest. Getting rid of a parallel org structure dedicated to testing for regressions etc. would certainly seem like a good explanation for a quality dip.