Comment by cjbgkagh
3 days ago
As a former MSFTy it does sound weird to me too. I didn’t see what Axels level was but a lot of people work for Microsoft and not many of them can expect to email the CEO and get a response. It seems a bit like a crash out, not the first I’ve seen levied at Azure, won’t be the last. They probably think it’s a mental health episode, if you’re an important CEO crazy people will email you all the time and the staff probably filter them out before they see it. Also this is a lot of internal gossip, I would be worried that airing this publicly would impinge on future career opportunities, even healthy orgs would appreciate some discretion.
I’m sure everything he said is completely true, Azure is one of the few tech stacks I refuse to work with and the predominant reason I left.
If you’ve joined an org and nothing works the reason is usually that the org is dysfunctional and there is often very little you can do about it, and you’re probably not the first person who’s tried and failed at it.
While Microsoft is hierarchical - but it did encourage reaching out in a "flat" manner internally.
In my experience - a loooong time ago ago now - executive leadership would participate in high-level escalations/critsits for large/key customers on calls. I was just a lowly field-engineer - but over the course of nearly 4-years, was on calls about 5 times with some of the big-names from that era that everyone knows about... And they seemed to emit enough empathy with the specific customer situation to move things forward.
However - being on the "other-side-of-the-fence" (i.e. external, consulting with Microsoft customers - some of them who even spend $1.5billion/year in M365/Azure licensing) and assisting clients with issues and remediations for the last 10-years, things are no longer the same. No amount of escalation gets further than occasionally reaching some level of the product team - and it can take 8-12 months before that even occurs. Troubleshooting and deep-engineering support skills for cloud customers are typically non-existent, and the assigned resources seem to just wait until the issue resolves itself...
Never worked at a FAANG, but from what I read from their cultures I don't think a letter to the CEO from a senior engineer would go entirely unnoticed there. CEO's might receive crazy letters, but hopefully not regularly from their senior engineering staff..
Microsoft has a large PR department to put out such false impressions. The culture has changed, AFAIK you used to be able to email Bill Gates and be fairly confident he would read it, but you better be sure it was worth reading or he would fire you. Now they’re unlikely to fire you but they’re unlikely to read it either.
Senior leadership seems to be more far sequestered now, a bit like Trump, surrounded by lackeys giving them an entirely false impression of the world. That’s how they could legitimately believe they were going to bury the IPhone.
putting aside that MS is too huge to even just know about the names of your senior engineers across the globe and that the mail might have gone directly to spam
there is still the issue that this might have been classified as "a crazy letter"
a lot of the article reminds me of people which might (or might not) have competency but insists they know better and are very stubborn and very bad and compromising on solutions. The subtext of the articles is not that far afar from "everyone does everything wrong, I know better, but no one listens to me". If you frame it like that it very much sounds like a "crazy" letter.
Strictly speaking it reminds me a lot about how Pirate Software spoke about various EA related topics. (Context: Pirate Software was a streamer and confidence man who got complemented up due to family connections and "confidently knew" everything better while having little skill or contributions and didn't know when to stop having a "confidently bad" opinion. Kinda sad ending given that he did motivate people to peruse their dream in game design and engage themself for animal protection.).
Or how I did do so in the past. Appearing very confident in your know-how ironically isn't always good.
And in case it's not clear: The writing reminding me of it and having patters of someone trying to create a maximally believable writing to make MS look bad doesn't mean that he behaves like that or that the writing is intended to be seen that way.
It's more about how we have a lot of "information" which all look very believable, but in the end miss means to both: Verify many of the named "facts". And, more importantly, judge the sentiment/implicit conveyed information.
Especially if we just take the mentioned "facts" without the implicit messages and ignore the him<->management communication issues I would guess a lot of that is true.
A "Senior Software Engineer" at Microsoft is someone with a pulse and 3 years of experience (due to title inflation); so despite the "senior" in the title definitely not "senior engineering staff".
I like how caring about fiduciary responsibility is a mental health episode or personality disorder to enough people in the comments. Simply being employed gives you a vested interest in keeping an operation above board and healthy. If you have a stock plan, you have equal rights to comment on issues as some low IQ private equity chief that does an end run to manipulate a company for their own benefit. The cattle psychology of most IT workers and mid level managers never ceases to amaze me.
It is emblematic of a crash out, I’ve seen a lot of them, and I’ve thought about doing it myself. I understand the impulse first hand. I did quit over my misgivings but I did not write a blog post about it, that would have been a career ended for me. I am expected to keep secrets as part of my job.
I work for myself now, for less money, but I do get to build things to the quality level that I want.
Sure, it is a "crash out" in the sense that you have an infinitesimal chance of changing things unless the founder is still involved because the situation didn't happen in a vacuum. And yep, you are narrowing your path significantly... sycophants have no tolerance for hardliners. But the mental heath episode is the opposite, to keep reporting for duty once you know something is deleterious. A lot of white collar people are on psychotropic drugs or otherwise self-medicate with alcohol and addictions and it's not difficult to diagnose why. Congrats on going your own way.