Comment by simonw
19 days 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.
19 days 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.
I spent 15 years as a senior dev on the Visual Studio team followed by 5 years on the Xcode team at Apple.
Individual engineers can be talented, professional, and end-user focused. Most of that effort gets lost when PMs refuse to work with each other in a coherent manner. Most of the major issues we ran into weren’t engineering bugs per se, they were the result of management refusing to allow teams to communicate effectively.
When we were first building out the original C# functionality, the C# team refused to talk to the existing compiler teams. I spent more time acting as a go-between than I did solving actual technical problems.
Good people can produce crappy software in that environment.
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.
And it's not just Microsoft. Apple and other are having the same issue. Something fundamental seems to have happened post Covid but before AI.
WFH, flood of Dev hiring, increasingly hostile worker relations, a bunch of web 2.0 folks finally retiring, VC money drying up...
take your pick.
Software is just crappy these days.
> Something fundamental seems to have happened
It just became more visible: testing _is_ expensive and time consuming.
But M$ share price goes up! Investors are smart as they are rich! And they do believe in this all!
/sarcasm
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
If product->quality_x, I'm okay with employee->?quality_x — but not with either employee->quality_x or employer->!quality_x. A better thing to remember is that people have themselves to feed. Of those 100k engineers, how many can say "no, you don't, Satya, ain't no besmirching my code with slop"?
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.
These giant firms aren’t uniform monoliths, especially MS.
Microsoft has some clear ‘A’ teams (compilers, industry leading languages, F*, pioneering web tech, OS innovations, etc), but also ‘B’, ‘C’ and ‘D’ teams, and MS is often reactively chasing industry trends. They’re industry leaders, but also victims of their Office, Windows, and Cloud teams pooping on one another at critical market junctures.
In .Net land we can inspect their library code. A number of these ‘Enterprise’ packages around their ‘Enterprise’ solutions are … just passable. Often something you’d write a proper version of to avoid clear issues. When our juniors are delivering better than their official offerings, in light of wizardry being displayed elsewhere, I think we are seeing systematic effects of corporate culture and customer base.
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.
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.