Comment by jordemort
5 hours ago
I used to work at GitHub. I think you should find a new job.
Before Microsoft came along, the entire company was aligned from the bottom to the top around the goal of delivering a single great product. As soon as they bought us, that changed; there were now lots of ways for an individual to succeed at GitHub-the-division-of-Microsoft that had nothing to do with GitHub-the-product. Now GitHub doesn't even have its own top, the org chart just smears into the Microsoft one at some hazy point. Perverse incentives abound.
An organization like Microsoft can never recreate the magic that was GitHub. There's just too many competing interests and agendas that have absolutely noting to do with making GitHub better. In the time before I left, I actually encountered many people who didn't care if they were making it worse, if it advanced their other goals.
This isn't a surprise at all. I saw the exact same thing at Meta. The incentives are so strong to improve your individual performance that it's hard to resist, literally hundreds of thousands of dollars at stake.
Now with the fear of constant layoffs at Microsoft and Meta too, it's even more critical for individual engineers to optimize their performance review or you might lose your job. Sadly this is hard to line up with putting out a good product.
Maybe I'm naïve, but it seems like the people who keep their eye on the ball and really try to make a great product are the ones who win out in the long run.
If you optimize for performance reviews, you'll make a lot of money, yeah. But you'll eventually find yourself overemployed and incapable of keeping up with that gambit anymore. Or, you'll find yourself doing something you never wanted to do. In extreme cases, it's like those people at Palantir in that post last week, realizing they're the bad guys. Usually it's just looking at your calendar on Monday evening, seeing a wall of meetings from 4PM to 9PM, and telling your kid you can't go to the park today.
Meanwhile, the "product people" I know well are all doing really cool stuff during the day, then going home to enjoy their lives. They don't make as much money, but they're happy.
Quote that one Wu-Tang song today, and you'll be quoting that one Talking Heads song in a couple years. I guess.
"Maybe"? You actively enable that corruption and advocate for turning a blind eye to it and the consequences.
Those "overemployed" people are your bosses, indeed unable to keep up, steering you into the situation of "those people at Palantir".
When things spiral downward, telling yourself how you're "relatively fine still" with blinders on short-term, "works" just up to hitting solid ground.
Protec ya Neck but what's the other one?
1 reply →
I would argue it goes even a step further: any org the size of Microsoft struggles to maintain the quality of... well, anything. And, added to that, Microsoft seems exceptionally bad at doing fucking anything now. Azure is a complete mess, Windows is an utter dumpster fire, the office suite feels like it gets just slightly worse with every update, Copilot is a fucking joke compared to every other AI on offer (and hilariously, will agree with everything I've said here!), they won't even use their own frameworks to develop software anymore!
Microsoft is literally too big to fail and it's their sole asset at this point. When companies like Github get bought by Microsoft, I just put a clock on the wall in my mind. Just a matter of time before the shit seeps in.
They can't help it. They are organizationally unable to function. It's so much worse than misaligned incentives and redundant management (though those are factors): they seem culturally, institutionally, unable to just... DO ANYTHING. Everything they do is 1 step forward and 4-20 steps back. They are too big and they should be broken up for their own good as well as the good of every user of their software.