Comment by jarjoura
19 hours ago
The way these companies are run so cut-throat while also being worth a trillion dollars is such a fundamental systemic failure.
To say that it's because Microsoft overhired is a gross mis-remembering of the last 20 years.
For starters, I remember way back in the late 2000s meeting an engineer from the office team. Their entire job was focused on making buttons. Microsoft also used to employee engineers focused soley on testing software, though I've heard that has changed.
Anyway, this is a company with decades long cultural roots for enormously large teams where each person is hyper focused on tiny little pieces of a much larger product.
Also, let's not forget that they bought up 1/3 of the gaming industry.
I don't mind that Microsoft is hurting, because it makes mid products, that always seem to fail-up. However, I do mind that the people are okay that the answer is to lay people off instead of, maybe, breaking the company back up into smaller companies that preserve the stability of the workforce.
I started my career as an SDET at Microsoft. Yes its correct they no longer have test automation engineers, but I never felt the org I was in was useless or that people were too narrowly focused.
Maybe it was the org we were in, Office could have been different, but our challenge was usually wanting more people on the team to help spread the load rather than less.
And for what its worth, I didn't intend to go into test at the time but it was a great place for me to start. I picked up a habit of writing production code in more testable ways, considering edge cases, implementing observability, etc. Those skills are often picked up along the way but it definitely helped me out starting with a much stronger basis of those skills.
"Microsoft also used to employee engineers focused soley on testing software"
Is this weird in any way? I live in EU land, but this does not seem too uncommon. As a developer Ive had assignments where I only wrote unit test, another where I was reponsible for daily CI running well (though both moved towards development eventually). I heard just the other day about a competitor where you did not write your own test code.
It's sort of weird in a world that has moved to an DevOps-style ethos for most development.
But yes, before that it would be not at all unusual to have “test engineers” or other technical staff whose entire responsibility laid with setting up test environments and running QA of products. These people did not do product dev, though they may have been involved in writing supporting test platform libraries or even maintaining test infrastructure (like IBM Jazz).
Even today in the U.S. companies that haven’t fully jumped onto newer development practices probably still have QA and/or test departments.
>It's sort of weird in a world that has moved to an DevOps-style ethos for most development.
The world at large makes all sorts of trends, and that by itself doesn't make them smart. As a developer, you are likely to have blind spots when it comes to quality and reliability as a result of having written the code. Even a team of developers cross-testing each other's code will not have the same ability to find flaws (before they embarrass you in front of the customer/client/user) as a dedicated tester whose job it is solely to find new (and old) ways to break things (and document them.)
DevOps is a completely different thing (though they work together with testers.)
It is only weird to have dedicated QA on your team if you don't give a fuck about releasing shit with bugs in it for the user to bump into.
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Isn't this still a thing? "Software Engineer in Test" being the newer term?
I just checked LinkedIn and they have quite a few job listings in this vein. Which makes sense: in the "AI and YOLO" development lifecycle, automated testing is more important than ever.
60k workers is only ~18 billion. Maybe 36 billion. Maybe even 72.
That's small potatoes vs their new excess capex spend of 100sB/y.
This isn't the end.
They aren't going to solve their capex problem through voluntary layoffs or RIFs. They may letore people go, but I expect its more about reorganizing and refocusing what they're working on rather than saving money.
> breaking the company back up into smaller companies that preserve the stability of the workforce.
Blasphemy! Bring the torches!
> worth a trillion dollars
You mean 3.96T dollars, right?
This feels like a failure in (late stage) capitalism more than corporates.
I would love if we'd put efforts towards better economic/political systems.