6 ms·

Former MSFTy, don’t bother wasting your time giving feedback. Nobody cares, those that cared left. Microsoft has a weird culture, very top down, very passive ag

Former MSFTy, don’t bother wasting your time giving feedback. Nobody cares, those that cared left. Microsoft has a weird culture, very top down, very passive aggressive between departments. For a brief while I would diligently prepare bugs for the dog food software. I would even walk over to visit people responsible for it and chat about it. Even for software where ‘zero bugs’ was important they’d just delete a whole bunch of bugs and see if any bounce (come back). Eventually people get sick of refilling so they get to zero bug bounce by exhausting the very people trying to help them. Enough social media pressure may end up risking a line item in a PMs yearly goals. So that might get looked at. Even the some of the most backward laggards (e.g. government departments) are sick to death of Microsoft and have long been introducing policies that all new software has to be web only. Those pointing to Azure as the future should known that they have very aggressive sales who often vastly oversell to customers. Customers aren’t renewing at the same level. Plus I don’t see them being able to compete with Amazon long term. You can only buy Skype for the bundled government customer so many times.

zitterbewegung 5y ago
I would rather have a bug report basically ignored than actually modified. There is a big difference between ignored and modified because it speaks to not only we are going to ignore this but no one will respect the content of the forum. I remember when an admin for reddit changed a bunch of comments and it was controversial when he did it an they introduced a policy that would disallow engineers to have that kind of access to the database [1]
- cjbgkagh 5y ago
  Totally agree, beyond the pale. My experience predates the Feedback Hub, but I’ve only heard it has gotten worse after my tenure. I assume bugs would still get copied into a separate internal bug tracking which has an edit history. I assume it was an overzealous contractor with a cultural misunderstanding.
theturtletalks 5y ago
VS Code and GitHub will hard carry Azure if need be
- azemetre 5y ago
  Shouldn't that be the other way around? What good is it for a company if the only products people end up using are the ones given for free? I'm sure other software companies faced similar fates (no one paying for services, only using freely available services) but I can't think of any ATM.
  - theturtletalks 5y ago
    I’m thinking vertical integration where you write your code on VS, host it and collaborate on GitHub, and deploy to Azure. I always thought GitHub was a hedge for Azure against the other cloud providers.
  - WhyNotHugo 5y ago
    > What good is it for a company if the only products people end up using are the ones given for free? I think Facebook helps answer that question a bit: just because someone is a user doesn't mean they're not the product. Giving out one product if it helps other ulterior motives is still profit. Vertical integration also plays a part in this. Especially if the paid product re-invents something in a non-standard way, and then the free product only supports than.
    - azemetre 5y ago
      That's fair but I thought we were talking about in the sense of software companies? Facebook makes a large majority of their money through advertising, not the amount of installs they get from pytorch or react. What sort of advertising can you honestly inject into something like VS Code to keep users from leaving? I do agree about vertical integration, another user mentioned using VS Code and Github as a means to introduce Azure. That makes more sense to me and I neglected the thought.
- whydid 5y ago
WhyNotHugo 5y ago
> Even for software where ‘zero bugs’ was important they’d just delete a whole bunch of bugs and see if any bounce (come back). Eventually people get sick of refilling so they get to zero but bounce by exhausting the very people eying time help them. The open-source equivalent of this behaviour is "stale bots" that close or lock issues with no activity. Or "moving discussion to a separate tracker", with all bugs getting closed and a polite request to re-open them. Or a "locking bugs older than X months, please open a new one if still applicable". Sure, opening it again isn't a big deal. Re-opening all bugs ever opened by all humans is just pointless work for no obvious benefit. Having zero open issues should never be a goal, any mature project has open issues. Trying to reach zero is chasing a number that won't make a product better; it's just a number.
- cjbgkagh 5y ago
  Those bots drive me insane; it punishes the most helpful the most. I would much rather they leave it open. I often find myself digging around closed issues to find people with similar problems.
  - howdydoo 5y ago
    Has anyone made a bot yet to automatically reply to stalebot so issues aren't closed?
    - EMM_386 5y ago
      > Has anyone made a bot yet to automatically reply to stalebot so issues aren't closed? stalebots serve a purpose but they can be extremely annoying also. I literally have 10+ issues bookmarked on Github I have to keep responding on to prevent the stalebots from wiping the issue out. They are all issues affecting my software, and I don't want them closed by a bot just because nobody has gotten around to fixing them. Maybe I should just go in there and submit a PR, if only I could find the time.
  - notreallyserio 5y ago
    My favorite thing about stalebots: using the reaction emojis doesn't count (afaict) so me-tooing is encouraged.
phillipcarter 5y ago
> Former MSFTy, don’t bother wasting your time giving feedback. Nobody cares, those that cared left. What you're describing does not comport with my experience there. Personally, I ensured that every issue filed on GitHub was triaged (read, replied if necessary, de-duped if necessary, labeled appropriately, assigned a severity/priority) and that all feedback items from the Visual Studio feedback system that applied to my product area was either (a) de-duped to GitHub and given the same treatment, or (b) dealt with in that system because it might have had some info that could constitute private data being leaked (sometimes I'd create a representative issue on GitHub and de-dupe to that one if appropriate). What I'm describing is actually routine for most PMs and engineers in the group I was in, and that's still the case today. I won't claim that it's perfect or that everyone who files an issue will have their bugs dealt with immediately, but I've had several community members give positive feedback about the whole thing and talk about how it's like night and day compared to previous eras at the company. > Even for software where ‘zero bugs’ was important they’d just delete a whole bunch of bugs and see if any bounce (come back). Eventually people get sick of refilling so they get to zero but bounce by exhausting the very people eying time help them. This is ridiculous and I sincerely hope it's not happening outside of small groups (who should stop right now). I never saw this happen. We'd deprecate some older things and then close associated bugs as not applicable, but declaring bankruptcy on a bunch of legit bugs would be unheard of in the group I worked with. If you were caught doing that you'd be in some deep shit, since it's a violation of the trust your community places in you to be a responsible caretaker of the software they rely on. > Enough social media pressure may end up risking a line item in a PMs yearly goals. Social media pressure is a thing, sadly, but also not that much of a thing. Only in rare cases did something exploding on twitter or whatever cause action on our end. I'm also curious where in Microsoft a single PM's line items are treated with that much relative importance. This whole notion of "PMs dictate and devs make it happen" is bizarre to me because figuring out what to do next was always a collaboration and careful evaluation of tradeoffs across both disciplines. Again, it wasn't perfect and there's much I wish was different, but fundamentally it was sound and constructive. Any of my line items as a PM wouldn't somehow get re-prioritized just because someone yelled about it on social media. Anyways, I'm sorry you had a bad time with what seems like it may have been a bad group. If what you're saying is true, I hope that changes for the group you were with.
_8j50 5y ago
They don't need to compete with amazon they just need to be profitable. Their AAD integrations are nice and their portal+ux(including api+powershell) and Defender ATP for E5 customers make them much better than GCP and in some cases AWS. The big three are here to stay.
- cjbgkagh 5y ago
  They need large amounts of exponential growth, it’s baked into their current value which they need to justify their investments. Microsoft has reoriented itself around Azure and if Azure was merely just profitable Microsoft would have to jettison a lot of what they do. Without another money printer it would be a blood bath. I think that like Auditing companies there might be a bit of a rotation, or risk spreading among the big providers. Maybe it could help get a discount from Amazon if you could show that you could move to Azure for a little while. My main worry that their sales will run out of wealthy suckers, and efficiency gains from CPUs may slow down a bit in time.
  - _8j50 5y ago
    My point was Azure can't compete with aws on small/medium size orgs but for large corps who can afford E5 and more it has tremenduous value. Existing windows IT likes azure better. Their main income as a company is still licenses and support which extends to Azure.
    - cjbgkagh 5y ago
      Their prices are targeted towards large corps, I think that by leaving room at the small/medium orgs you're allowing competition to improve to a point where they will go after your large corp customers as well. It also becomes difficult to lower prices because you'd lose more from your existing customers than you'd gain from new customers, so you kind of get stuck at a high price point and slowly bleed out customers who are on the margins. You can make lots of the money in the process and doing this could be a perfectly legitimate strategy. The value adds may be enough to prevent this. I don't know. My datapoint was that it seemed that initial purchases were based on vast overestimates of provisioning and renewals tend to come with significant reductions. This is something that can stay hidden during a period of high grown where there is a lot of onboarding but I would expect to show up in the numbers quite quickly if growth slows with a ~3 year lag.
teddyh 5y ago
> Microsoft has a weird culture, […] very passive aggressive between departments. https://bonkersworld.net/organizational-charts https://bonkersworld.net/organizational-charts
julianz 5y ago
Not my experience, I reported a typo in a minor Git sub-dialog in VS, and it was triaged, fixed and released in VS2022. Happy days!

zitterbewegung 5y ago

I would rather have a bug report basically ignored than actually modified. There is a big difference between ignored and modified because it speaks to not only we are going to ignore this but no one will respect the content of the forum. I remember when an admin for reddit changed a bunch of comments and it was controversial when he did it an they introduced a policy that would disallow engineers to have that kind of access to the database [1]

cjbgkagh 5y ago
Totally agree, beyond the pale. My experience predates the Feedback Hub, but I’ve only heard it has gotten worse after my tenure. I assume bugs would still get copied into a separate internal bug tracking which has an edit history. I assume it was an overzealous contractor with a cultural misunderstanding.

theturtletalks 5y ago

VS Code and GitHub will hard carry Azure if need be

azemetre 5y ago
Shouldn't that be the other way around? What good is it for a company if the only products people end up using are the ones given for free? I'm sure other software companies faced similar fates (no one paying for services, only using freely available services) but I can't think of any ATM.
- theturtletalks 5y ago
  I’m thinking vertical integration where you write your code on VS, host it and collaborate on GitHub, and deploy to Azure. I always thought GitHub was a hedge for Azure against the other cloud providers.
- WhyNotHugo 5y ago
  > What good is it for a company if the only products people end up using are the ones given for free? I think Facebook helps answer that question a bit: just because someone is a user doesn't mean they're not the product. Giving out one product if it helps other ulterior motives is still profit. Vertical integration also plays a part in this. Especially if the paid product re-invents something in a non-standard way, and then the free product only supports than.
  - azemetre 5y ago
    That's fair but I thought we were talking about in the sense of software companies? Facebook makes a large majority of their money through advertising, not the amount of installs they get from pytorch or react. What sort of advertising can you honestly inject into something like VS Code to keep users from leaving? I do agree about vertical integration, another user mentioned using VS Code and Github as a means to introduce Azure. That makes more sense to me and I neglected the thought.
whydid 5y ago

WhyNotHugo 5y ago

> Even for software where ‘zero bugs’ was important they’d just delete a whole bunch of bugs and see if any bounce (come back). Eventually people get sick of refilling so they get to zero but bounce by exhausting the very people eying time help them. The open-source equivalent of this behaviour is "stale bots" that close or lock issues with no activity. Or "moving discussion to a separate tracker", with all bugs getting closed and a polite request to re-open them. Or a "locking bugs older than X months, please open a new one if still applicable". Sure, opening it again isn't a big deal. Re-opening all bugs ever opened by all humans is just pointless work for no obvious benefit. Having zero open issues should never be a goal, any mature project has open issues. Trying to reach zero is chasing a number that won't make a product better; it's just a number.

cjbgkagh 5y ago
Those bots drive me insane; it punishes the most helpful the most. I would much rather they leave it open. I often find myself digging around closed issues to find people with similar problems.
- howdydoo 5y ago
  Has anyone made a bot yet to automatically reply to stalebot so issues aren't closed?
  - EMM_386 5y ago
    > Has anyone made a bot yet to automatically reply to stalebot so issues aren't closed? stalebots serve a purpose but they can be extremely annoying also. I literally have 10+ issues bookmarked on Github I have to keep responding on to prevent the stalebots from wiping the issue out. They are all issues affecting my software, and I don't want them closed by a bot just because nobody has gotten around to fixing them. Maybe I should just go in there and submit a PR, if only I could find the time.
- notreallyserio 5y ago
  My favorite thing about stalebots: using the reaction emojis doesn't count (afaict) so me-tooing is encouraged.

phillipcarter 5y ago

> Former MSFTy, don’t bother wasting your time giving feedback. Nobody cares, those that cared left. What you're describing does not comport with my experience there. Personally, I ensured that every issue filed on GitHub was triaged (read, replied if necessary, de-duped if necessary, labeled appropriately, assigned a severity/priority) and that all feedback items from the Visual Studio feedback system that applied to my product area was either (a) de-duped to GitHub and given the same treatment, or (b) dealt with in that system because it might have had some info that could constitute private data being leaked (sometimes I'd create a representative issue on GitHub and de-dupe to that one if appropriate). What I'm describing is actually routine for most PMs and engineers in the group I was in, and that's still the case today. I won't claim that it's perfect or that everyone who files an issue will have their bugs dealt with immediately, but I've had several community members give positive feedback about the whole thing and talk about how it's like night and day compared to previous eras at the company. > Even for software where ‘zero bugs’ was important they’d just delete a whole bunch of bugs and see if any bounce (come back). Eventually people get sick of refilling so they get to zero but bounce by exhausting the very people eying time help them. This is ridiculous and I sincerely hope it's not happening outside of small groups (who should stop right now). I never saw this happen. We'd deprecate some older things and then close associated bugs as not applicable, but declaring bankruptcy on a bunch of legit bugs would be unheard of in the group I worked with. If you were caught doing that you'd be in some deep shit, since it's a violation of the trust your community places in you to be a responsible caretaker of the software they rely on. > Enough social media pressure may end up risking a line item in a PMs yearly goals. Social media pressure is a thing, sadly, but also not that much of a thing. Only in rare cases did something exploding on twitter or whatever cause action on our end. I'm also curious where in Microsoft a single PM's line items are treated with that much relative importance. This whole notion of "PMs dictate and devs make it happen" is bizarre to me because figuring out what to do next was always a collaboration and careful evaluation of tradeoffs across both disciplines. Again, it wasn't perfect and there's much I wish was different, but fundamentally it was sound and constructive. Any of my line items as a PM wouldn't somehow get re-prioritized just because someone yelled about it on social media. Anyways, I'm sorry you had a bad time with what seems like it may have been a bad group. If what you're saying is true, I hope that changes for the group you were with.

_8j50 5y ago

They don't need to compete with amazon they just need to be profitable. Their AAD integrations are nice and their portal+ux(including api+powershell) and Defender ATP for E5 customers make them much better than GCP and in some cases AWS. The big three are here to stay.

cjbgkagh 5y ago
They need large amounts of exponential growth, it’s baked into their current value which they need to justify their investments. Microsoft has reoriented itself around Azure and if Azure was merely just profitable Microsoft would have to jettison a lot of what they do. Without another money printer it would be a blood bath. I think that like Auditing companies there might be a bit of a rotation, or risk spreading among the big providers. Maybe it could help get a discount from Amazon if you could show that you could move to Azure for a little while. My main worry that their sales will run out of wealthy suckers, and efficiency gains from CPUs may slow down a bit in time.
- _8j50 5y ago
  My point was Azure can't compete with aws on small/medium size orgs but for large corps who can afford E5 and more it has tremenduous value. Existing windows IT likes azure better. Their main income as a company is still licenses and support which extends to Azure.
  - cjbgkagh 5y ago
    Their prices are targeted towards large corps, I think that by leaving room at the small/medium orgs you're allowing competition to improve to a point where they will go after your large corp customers as well. It also becomes difficult to lower prices because you'd lose more from your existing customers than you'd gain from new customers, so you kind of get stuck at a high price point and slowly bleed out customers who are on the margins. You can make lots of the money in the process and doing this could be a perfectly legitimate strategy. The value adds may be enough to prevent this. I don't know. My datapoint was that it seemed that initial purchases were based on vast overestimates of provisioning and renewals tend to come with significant reductions. This is something that can stay hidden during a period of high grown where there is a lot of onboarding but I would expect to show up in the numbers quite quickly if growth slows with a ~3 year lag.

teddyh 5y ago

> Microsoft has a weird culture, […] very passive aggressive between departments. https://bonkersworld.net/organizational-charts https://bonkersworld.net/organizational-charts

julianz 5y ago

Not my experience, I reported a typo in a minor Git sub-dialog in VS, and it was triaged, fixed and released in VS2022. Happy days!