3 ms·

They have a lot of staff turnover too, and each generation of new SDE has less of a clue how the old stuff worked. So when they're tasked with replacing the old

by asveikau 10mo ago

They have a lot of staff turnover too, and each generation of new SDE has less of a clue how the old stuff worked. So when they're tasked with replacing the old stuff, they don't understand what it does, and the rewrite ends up doing less. That was my impression of one of the major problems when I worked there 2008-2011. But I don't think it's just one problem.

nextos 10mo ago
I think that because their total compensation is lower than FAANG, especially at senior levels, and they are seen as uncool, they sometimes have issues retaining top-notch talent. It's paradoxical, because MS Research is probably the best PLT organization in the world. But they have failed to move a lot of that know-how into production. Besides, because it's an older company, it might have more organizational entropy, i.e. dysfunctional middle-management. As you say it's probably several other causes too. But still, hard to understand how they can create F#, F*, and Dafny, just to name a few, and fail with their mainstream products.
- zipy124 10mo ago
  You also probably couldn't pay me enough to work in the kind of environment that produces such buggy software as Microsoft teams. A message based app which can't even guarantee delivery of messages, or synchronization across devices isn't a good sign for management and delivery.
  - asveikau 10mo ago
    I was a unix head at the time and ran OpenBSD on my personal Thinkpad. I figured a stint on the Windows team would broaden my horizons and expose me to differences. It did that. I don't regret it. I did in the end feel that the company was not my vibe, but I respect and appreciate some of what came out of there.
- asveikau 10mo ago
  Back when I was there, part of my calculus was that cost of living in Seattle was cheaper than the bay. It was about 35% cheaper back then, according to regional CPI data I looked at at the time. Not sure what the difference is today. I believe housing is still substantially cheaper. I think a few years after I left when more Big Tech opened offices in Seattle, competing companies started paying Bay Area salaries for Seattle living, removing this argument. I haven't watched this closely in recent years. But fwiw, I was able to save and invest a lot in my Seattle days, despite a salary that was lower than in the bay.
  - SpaceNoodled 10mo ago
    Seattle cost of living is still significantly cheaper than the Bay Area. A lower salary goes even farther given the lack of state income tax, too.
    - AdrianB1 10mo ago
      But in a world where Amazon prices are the same, car and gas are the same, cost of living is just rent?
      - SpaceNoodled 10mo ago
        Not sure what you're getting at. Housing is the main cost, and is drastically cheaper in Seattle. Food in Seattle is a bit more pricey.
        AdrianB1 10mo ago
        Housing is just one component, there is a lot of other stuff that has equal price: if you order stuff from Amazon the price is the same, if you buy a new car the price is the same.
        SpaceNoodled 10mo ago
        State and local taxes can make a significant difference for general goods, and especially car purchases. Amazon also isn't a restaurant, and while they do sort of sell groceries through Whole Foods and Amazon Fresh, those are again priced locally.
- pjmlp 10mo ago
  Because those languages were created at Microsoft Research, not DevDiv nor Windows. All different business units.
- markus_zhang 10mo ago
  Is compensation really the issue? Like, people earning 160k simply can’t take a dive into the OS source code and make proper fixes, but people earning 250k magically can? I don't know. I know there are a lot of people who want to work on the OS source code, given the chance, but need some hand holding in the beginning. Companies in general are not willing to give them the chance, because they don't want to hand hold them.
  - cjbgkagh 10mo ago
    I think uncompetitive compensation is the dominant factor in Microsoft’s decline. Up there with stack ranking. They claim that it’s 30% cheaper to live there but then they go and capture most of that 30% for themselves. It is my opinion that developer ability is on a Pareto distribution, like the 80 20 rule when 80% of the work is done by 20% of the people. The job market is more liquid for those that are extremely productive so it’s pretty easy to for them to get a pay rise of 30% by switching companies. In the worst case you can often come back with a promotion because, like many companies, Microsoft is more likely to promote you when trying to poach you back. Doing a 2 year stint at Amazon was quite common. The other problem is that when your best people leave is that the process is iterative, not only are you getting paid less but you are now working with people who couldn’t easily switch jobs. You start being surrounded by incompetence. Stack ranking, which I hear is still being done unofficially, also means that you put your promotion and career in danger by joining a highly productive team. So it is rather difficult to get highly productive people to work on the same team. Being paid less, being surrounded by incompetence, and being forced to engage in constant high stakes politicking really sucks.
    - markus_zhang 10mo ago
      I still think there are ways to hand hold people a bit and grow an ordinary engineer to a better one who is fit for system programming in maybe 12 months. Otherwise as you said the only way is to offer the best compensation so that people don't leave. But again those people probably would leave for different reasons (culture e.g.).
      - 10mo ago
- ethbr1 10mo ago
  > dysfunctional middle-management I thought about this a lot while working at a high-growth company recently. Decided that regular (quarterly) manager rankings (HR-supported, anonymous) by 2-3 levels of subordinates is the only way to solve this at scale. The central problem is: assuming a CEO accidentally promoted a bad middle manager, then how do they ever find out? Most companies (top-down rankings-only) use project success as their primary manager performance signal. Unfortunately, this has 3 problems: (1) project success doesn't prove a manager isn't bad, (2) above-managers only hear from managers, and (3) it incentivizes managers to hack project success metrics / definitions. Adding a servant/leader skip-level metric is a critical piece of information on "On, this person is toxic and everyone thinks poorly of them, despite the fact that they say everyone loves them."
  - nextos 10mo ago
    Sounds a like a great solution, adding random skip connections so that information flows from the bottom to the top of the hierarchy. Certainly, few companies have managed to avoid this trap. It's largely an unsolved problem. I've often met managers and execs two levels above me that had a completely delusional view of what was going on below them due to lies spread by middle-management.
    - ethbr1 10mo ago
      > completely delusional view of what was going on below them due to lies spread by middle-management Corporate dysfunction made more sense to me when I realized higher execs, because of span of control, are too busy to dig into any issue themselves. Consequently, it's trivial in most orgs for the only information path to be through managers. Also why I think more effective execs tend to have parallel investigation resources. E.g. their do-anything assistant who they task with fact finding
pjmlp 10mo ago
I can confirm, the guys still around for WinUI team and related frameworks, always appear clueless when posed questions about Windows features they were supposed to know about. Just go watch a few recordings on their YouTube channel.
Kye 10mo ago
Raymond Chen tries to document it, but he's just one person. https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing

nextos 10mo ago

I think that because their total compensation is lower than FAANG, especially at senior levels, and they are seen as uncool, they sometimes have issues retaining top-notch talent. It's paradoxical, because MS Research is probably the best PLT organization in the world. But they have failed to move a lot of that know-how into production. Besides, because it's an older company, it might have more organizational entropy, i.e. dysfunctional middle-management. As you say it's probably several other causes too. But still, hard to understand how they can create F#, F*, and Dafny, just to name a few, and fail with their mainstream products.

zipy124 10mo ago
You also probably couldn't pay me enough to work in the kind of environment that produces such buggy software as Microsoft teams. A message based app which can't even guarantee delivery of messages, or synchronization across devices isn't a good sign for management and delivery.
- asveikau 10mo ago
  I was a unix head at the time and ran OpenBSD on my personal Thinkpad. I figured a stint on the Windows team would broaden my horizons and expose me to differences. It did that. I don't regret it. I did in the end feel that the company was not my vibe, but I respect and appreciate some of what came out of there.
asveikau 10mo ago
Back when I was there, part of my calculus was that cost of living in Seattle was cheaper than the bay. It was about 35% cheaper back then, according to regional CPI data I looked at at the time. Not sure what the difference is today. I believe housing is still substantially cheaper. I think a few years after I left when more Big Tech opened offices in Seattle, competing companies started paying Bay Area salaries for Seattle living, removing this argument. I haven't watched this closely in recent years. But fwiw, I was able to save and invest a lot in my Seattle days, despite a salary that was lower than in the bay.
- SpaceNoodled 10mo ago
  Seattle cost of living is still significantly cheaper than the Bay Area. A lower salary goes even farther given the lack of state income tax, too.
  - AdrianB1 10mo ago
    But in a world where Amazon prices are the same, car and gas are the same, cost of living is just rent?
    - SpaceNoodled 10mo ago
      Not sure what you're getting at. Housing is the main cost, and is drastically cheaper in Seattle. Food in Seattle is a bit more pricey.
      - AdrianB1 10mo ago
        Housing is just one component, there is a lot of other stuff that has equal price: if you order stuff from Amazon the price is the same, if you buy a new car the price is the same.
        SpaceNoodled 10mo ago
        State and local taxes can make a significant difference for general goods, and especially car purchases. Amazon also isn't a restaurant, and while they do sort of sell groceries through Whole Foods and Amazon Fresh, those are again priced locally.
pjmlp 10mo ago
Because those languages were created at Microsoft Research, not DevDiv nor Windows. All different business units.
markus_zhang 10mo ago
Is compensation really the issue? Like, people earning 160k simply can’t take a dive into the OS source code and make proper fixes, but people earning 250k magically can? I don't know. I know there are a lot of people who want to work on the OS source code, given the chance, but need some hand holding in the beginning. Companies in general are not willing to give them the chance, because they don't want to hand hold them.
- cjbgkagh 10mo ago
  I think uncompetitive compensation is the dominant factor in Microsoft’s decline. Up there with stack ranking. They claim that it’s 30% cheaper to live there but then they go and capture most of that 30% for themselves. It is my opinion that developer ability is on a Pareto distribution, like the 80 20 rule when 80% of the work is done by 20% of the people. The job market is more liquid for those that are extremely productive so it’s pretty easy to for them to get a pay rise of 30% by switching companies. In the worst case you can often come back with a promotion because, like many companies, Microsoft is more likely to promote you when trying to poach you back. Doing a 2 year stint at Amazon was quite common. The other problem is that when your best people leave is that the process is iterative, not only are you getting paid less but you are now working with people who couldn’t easily switch jobs. You start being surrounded by incompetence. Stack ranking, which I hear is still being done unofficially, also means that you put your promotion and career in danger by joining a highly productive team. So it is rather difficult to get highly productive people to work on the same team. Being paid less, being surrounded by incompetence, and being forced to engage in constant high stakes politicking really sucks.
  - markus_zhang 10mo ago
    I still think there are ways to hand hold people a bit and grow an ordinary engineer to a better one who is fit for system programming in maybe 12 months. Otherwise as you said the only way is to offer the best compensation so that people don't leave. But again those people probably would leave for different reasons (culture e.g.).
    - 10mo ago
ethbr1 10mo ago
> dysfunctional middle-management I thought about this a lot while working at a high-growth company recently. Decided that regular (quarterly) manager rankings (HR-supported, anonymous) by 2-3 levels of subordinates is the only way to solve this at scale. The central problem is: assuming a CEO accidentally promoted a bad middle manager, then how do they ever find out? Most companies (top-down rankings-only) use project success as their primary manager performance signal. Unfortunately, this has 3 problems: (1) project success doesn't prove a manager isn't bad, (2) above-managers only hear from managers, and (3) it incentivizes managers to hack project success metrics / definitions. Adding a servant/leader skip-level metric is a critical piece of information on "On, this person is toxic and everyone thinks poorly of them, despite the fact that they say everyone loves them."
- nextos 10mo ago
  Sounds a like a great solution, adding random skip connections so that information flows from the bottom to the top of the hierarchy. Certainly, few companies have managed to avoid this trap. It's largely an unsolved problem. I've often met managers and execs two levels above me that had a completely delusional view of what was going on below them due to lies spread by middle-management.
  - ethbr1 10mo ago
    > completely delusional view of what was going on below them due to lies spread by middle-management Corporate dysfunction made more sense to me when I realized higher execs, because of span of control, are too busy to dig into any issue themselves. Consequently, it's trivial in most orgs for the only information path to be through managers. Also why I think more effective execs tend to have parallel investigation resources. E.g. their do-anything assistant who they task with fact finding

pjmlp 10mo ago

I can confirm, the guys still around for WinUI team and related frameworks, always appear clueless when posed questions about Windows features they were supposed to know about. Just go watch a few recordings on their YouTube channel.

Kye 10mo ago

Raymond Chen tries to document it, but he's just one person. https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing