This is what it all comes down to, whether at Bing, or at any other large organization. This isn't just large organizations, but also small. I worked at a sta

This is what it all comes down to, whether at Bing, or at any other large organization. This isn't just large organizations, but also small. I worked at a start up during the dot com boom that was the most dysfunctional I've ever worked at. If you read bug reports you'd be amazed to see how much bugs jumped around. Devs had a motto, "No my bug" while imitating Neo of the Matrix dodging bullets in slow-motion. And for a company that just existed a couple of years, they rewrote their core product like 3 or 4 times, because someone else wanted to be the hero. Part of this is, as you point out, that the dot com bubble was coming to an end and people saw that all the hours they put in were coming to be worth effectively nothing. I heard an anecdote about Microsoft before that when the stock was going up you could turn off the heat and no one would complain. But when the stock was flat/down HR would get complaints about how much it rained in Seattle and employees would say they didn't sign up for this many cloudy days.