Comment by tinco
3 days ago
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".