Comment by simonw
14 hours ago
Microsoft employ over 100,000 engineers. I'd advise against assuming that everything produced by any of them is bad because of bugs in Windows.
14 hours ago
Microsoft employ over 100,000 engineers. I'd advise against assuming that everything produced by any of them is bad because of bugs in Windows.
The criticism was directed at the company's product, not the employees...
I always wish that people would make this distinction more often ... the people=good, the product=bad ... people!=bad
The response appears to be pointing out that with so many employees (engineers), it's unlikely that they all work on Windows.
Maybe. But interpreting it thus requires too much charitableness for it not to have been uncharitable, whether intentionally or otherwise.
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Don’t the best of the best typically work on OS fundamentals though?
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And yet they still work for a company that has shown it isn’t overly concerned about quality or reliability in its products.
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Skilled engineers in an environment that doesn't care about quality may become dull, or simply be forced by the system they are in to not care. In practice they are just like us and so I assume they would find outlets in their free time.
I haven't spoken to a Microsoft developer in a while because there are few in the hacker communities I'm around (go figure?) so not entirely sure though. I want to understand.
They seem to be alienating a lot of their users right now in a lot of different products. There's a significant surge in open source software right now and Linux and all the people that are coming over are a bit more than usual. Their customer base seems tired of the game.
Not op, and I generally agree with your assumption but not for Microsoft, as I don't think it's limited to Windows:
Teams, Office (especially online), One Drive, SharePoint, Azure, GitHub, LinkedIn, all became very shitty and partially unusable with increasing number of weird bugs or problems lately.
But M$ share price goes up! Investors are smart as they are rich! And they do believe in this all!
/sarcasm
This is not about individual employees. It’s in the nature of being an employee to be beholden to what’s incentivized by their company’s management and structure.
Don’t employees have any say in some of the design , implementation, and quality bar? Management folks are employees as well. But perhaps they prefer the paycheck to voicing concerns around bad decisions. Nothing wrong with that but throwing all the blame on faceless management and structure seems not right since it evolves from collective activities.
“Show me the incentives and I’ll tell you the outcome” is exactly about this situation. People who do what they feel is right may be able to do so as long as it doesn’t conflict with company policy, but when it does (say you spend a little more time on perfecting a feature), it gets noticed and eventually corrected.
The problems with Windows today have nothing to do with bugs but with the strategic vision of Nadella.
And it’s the employees that’ll be laid off if the strategy doesn’t succeed because they just didn’t copilot hard enough or something.
This is also still small/unimportant enough not to be poisoned by their broken corporate culture.