7 ms·

I know blaming everything on LLMs is in vogue right now; but this is much more to do with Microsoft very publically firing the QA department[0][1] as a cost sav

I know blaming everything on LLMs is in vogue right now; but this is much more to do with Microsoft very publically firing the QA department[0][1] as a cost savings measure and claiming developers will do their own QA (long before LLMs were on the scene). It started in 2014 and the trickle never stopped. Microsoft has a cultural problem; it went from an "engineers" company to an MBA directed one, trying to maximize short-term shareholder value at the cost of long-term company reputation/growth. It is very common and typical of US Corporate culture today, and catastrophic in the long-run. [0] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/08/how-microsoft-dragged-its-development-practices-into-the-21st-century/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/08/how-m... [1] https://www.reuters.com/article/business/microsoft-expected-to-announce-job-cuts-this-week-bloomberg-idUSL4N0PQ12I/ https://www.reuters.com/article/business/microsoft-expected-...

Night_Thastus 9mo ago
Microsoft fired their QA because at the end of the day, they are beholden to shareholders. And those shareholders want higher profits. And if you want higher profits, you cut costs. It's not a culture problem. It's a 'being a business' problem, which unfortunately affects all publicly-traded companies.
- halapro 9mo ago
  Are businesses expected to boom and bust? Cost cutting is fine if you don't kill the company in the process.
  - Night_Thastus 9mo ago
    They know MS isn't going anywhere. Windows is too entrenched, users don't care or have feasible alternatives, for a variety of reasons. Plus, MS isn't in the OS business. They're in the data/metrics business.
    - zx8080 9mo ago
      > Plus, MS isn't in the OS business. They're in the data/metrics business. Datadog is. And snowflake. Even Google is. But MS does not like it's centered around data/metrics.
    - tonyedgecombe 9mo ago
      Windows has been losing market share for years now.
    - halapro 9mo ago
      This isn't 2012 anymore, most businesses live in the browser, they couldn't care less what OS they're running. The only reason Windows is still so popular is due to inertia. Ever Excel-centric businesses can use Excel in the browser. While it's true that Microsoft can live without Microsoft, it's still a huge channel. They already lost a whole very lucrative platform (mobile)
- rcxdude 9mo ago
  Shareholders are, on average, not this activist. A CEO can in fact run a public company with a long-term outlook instead of pumping the numbers for just the next quarter.
  - trimethylpurine 9mo ago
    Is that true? I've heard both sides of this. Here is a whole movement that I think believes otherwise: https://votelabor.org/articles/overturning-dodge-v-ford-reclaiming-corporate-power-for-the-people https://votelabor.org/articles/overturning-dodge-v-ford-recl... On the other hand, I've heard conflicting takes from attorneys in the corporate world.
- stephen_g 9mo ago
  That’s a cop-out though. Company boards are legally required to act in the best interests of shareholders, and plenty of shareholders would agree that running a business in a sustainable way that can deliver profits over the long term is more in their interests than a business trading its future for some short term profits. It’s a cultural problem really, where too many people who study business and economics have been taught this idea that it’s a moral necessity that businesses maximise profit for shareholders (to the point where plenty of people even wrongly believe that’s a legal requirement!), but it’s an ideological position that has only caused once great companies to fail and huge damage to our economies.
mancerayder 9mo ago
The arstechnica article was very good as a history of waterfall v sprint using MS as a case study. However the firing the QA department narrative is not supported: Prior to these cuts, Testing/QA staff was in some parts of the company outnumbering developers by about two to one. Afterward, the ratio was closer to one to one. As a precursor to these layoffs and the shifting roles of development and testing, the OSG renamed its test team to “Quality.” Two QA per dev?? That seems ginormous to me. What am I missing about the narrative about evil corp sending all of QA packing, that seems not supported here? The second, Reuters article seems like it's saying something different than the QA firing narrative - it seems to talk about Nokia acquisition specifically and a smattering of layoffs. Not supporting layoffs or eliminating QA, and I'm deeply annoyed at Windows 11. I just don't see these as supportive of the narrative here that QA is kaput.
- ethbr1 9mo ago
  > Two QA per dev?? QA is a lot cheaper than dev. If your goal is to make quality software* on a fixed budget, you want to be QA-heavy. * Note: the OS definition of "quality software" drastically differs from your average app.
  - pousada 9mo ago
    2 people doing QA per dev seems insane even if it’s a lot cheaper. M$ is hardly know for being obsessed with quality, they’d rather have 2 sales per dev (sales is even cheaper, basically pays for itself)
    - mancerayder 9mo ago
      I've never known M$ to be lacking on the sales front, personally!
    - CrossVR 9mo ago
      It's a lot easier to write code than to make sure it doesn't break something you didn't account for.
    - 9mo ago
ASalazarMX 9mo ago
It has been an MBA company for most of its life. If I had to draw the line, IMO seems Windows 2000 was the last engineer-driven product, and by then it had already developed predatory habits.
- Paianni 9mo ago
  There's always Windows Server...
Datagenerator 9mo ago
Let's hope for the catastrophic scenario. A world without Microsoft.. no telemetry or backdoors. Please continue on this track to disaster!
- anonymars 9mo ago
  Accelerationists seem to think the world after a vacuum is going to be some utopia I think more competition is better than less
  - windexh8er 9mo ago
    More competitionis better. If you take the market share and revenue off the table and spread that around in a competitive market you'd be in a much more interesting spot with respect to technology advancements. Instead we continue to stagnate with bullshit like Windows 10 --> Windows 11. Windows 11 was never supposed to exist, but $$$$$. There's literally nothing worth paying for in that upgrade. But Microsoft knows it can milk businesses and schools out of ridiculous profits for, essentially, the same garbage and also collude with hardware manufacturers to sell more PCs. [0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/gordonkelly/2015/05/08/microsoft-windows-10-last-windows/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/gordonkelly/2015/05/08/microsof...
    - happymellon 9mo ago
      > There's literally nothing worth paying for in that upgrade. Well there is the violations of Fitts law with the movement of the start button to the centre of the bar? But it does make it look slightly more Mac! They should make sure the next upgrade moves the corner to grab away from the actual corner, and that the cursor change for grabbing it doesn't always trigger if they want to really rip it off.
    - anonymars 9mo ago
      I think Windows 11 in particular is a confluence of two other problems with respect to competition: 1. Subscriptions instead of discrete paid versions removes the incentive to put out a good product. In the past, if the new version was bad it was a direct financial hit. But now there's no direct financial feedback loop, as long as it's not so terrible that you leave the subscription entirely 2. I think Windows 11 is the first time there's no other version of Windows still in support you can use to "ride it out"
miohtama 9mo ago
At least we get Visual Studio Code for free
- ljm 9mo ago
  Some useful tech has come out of the development of VS Code that every other editor has been able to benefit from but I don’t rate it much as an editor any more. It’s rare for MS to do just the embrace and extend part of EEE, unless Copilot is the latent implementation of ‘extinguish’.
  - wooger 9mo ago
    Other than what they're doing to the whole Open Source ecosystem by buying github, stealing all the code for their AI regardless of license, renaming multiple adjacent things to "Github *".
- sunaookami 9mo ago
  Yeah they baited everyone, blocked Python and C# plugins and then closed down their marketplace to 3rd party editors. Classic EEE tactic.
ferguess_k 9mo ago
I think all companies eventually mutate into a MBA company. For MSFT there was a culture from very early that PMs should lead the project instead of engineers. I read in "Showstoppers" that Cutler was very against of the idea and he pushed back. So that means even in the late 80s MSFT was already a MBA-centered company. The only reason that it has not degraded yet, was because it has not achieved the monopoly position. Once it does it started to chew on its success and quickly degraded into a quasi-feudal economic entity.
themafia 9mo ago
No one is blaming LLMs. Their presence in this situation casts a conspicuous shadow though.
teleportmepls 9mo ago
> Microsoft has a cultural problem; it went from an "engineers" company to an MBA directed one I don’t think this is just Microsoft. Few engineers and visionaries that started these big companies are still at the helm. It’s an opportunity for other companies to take over imo.
- oblio 9mo ago
  > It’s an opportunity for other companies to take over imo. This is a feeling commonly shared here. I'd like to point out that IBM still dominates the large, billion-dollars worth mainframe market, almost 70 years after it invented it, despite continuous mismanagement for probably 40 years. Microsoft dominates the PC market 40 years after taking it over with MS-DOS, and despite multiple debacles (Windows Millennium, Windows Vista, now Win 11, probably others I'm forgetting). Microsoft dominates the office suite market 30+ years after taking it over with MS Office, despite some huge controversies (the Ribbon still annoys nerds, to this day). More than that, Microsoft has leverage MS Office to become the close second cloud provider after AWS despite starting far behind it. Google and Apple will probably dominate the smartphone and tablet markets for a long time, after taking over those markets 10+ years ago. The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent and a company with a massive moat can outlive most of us. I'd actually turn this on its head by saying that assuming a new comer will topple the incumbent "any day now" is the irrational approach to a market.
  - coredog64 9mo ago
    > I'd like to point out that IBM still dominates the large, billion-dollars worth mainframe market Companies continue to pay the IBM tax, but the way IBM writes support contracts incentivizes customers to work very hard at moving workloads to Windows/UNIX. IBM is choosing "Better to reign in [mainframe], then serve in [commodity compute]." (All apologies to John Milton)
  - kwanbix 9mo ago
    You are missing 8.0. When Microsoft in its incomparable wisdom decided we needed a tablet OS in the PC.
throwaway85825 9mo ago
There's a great talk that explains how code structure ends up looking like the org chart, and every subsequent organization chart layered on top producing spaghetti code. Windows is now old and full of spaghetti code. Then Microsoft layed off all the expensive seniors who knew the stack and replaced them with cheaper diverse and outsourced staff. Then the people who can't maintain the code use AI and just ship it without any testing. edit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_law
rolandog 9mo ago
Wholeheartedly agree. I can't wait until we can live in a better era where we look back with collective disgust at the blatant white-collar crime time period that was ushered by Friedman and Welch. That, plus the current era, feels to me like a massive dog whistle for people who can't read satirical stories like A Modest Proposal without taking them as instructions.
deleted 9mo ago
[deleted]
joe_the_user 9mo ago
Microsoft has a cultural problem; it went from an "engineers" company to an MBA directed one Every simplistic analysis of failing company X uses a hackneyed cliche like this. But in the case of MS, this is completely ridiculous. MS has been renowned for shitty software, since day one. Bill Gates won the 90s software battle based on monopoly, connections and "first feature to market" tactics. If anything, the heyday of MS quality was the mid 2000s, where it was occasionally lauded for producing good things. But it was never an engineers company (that's Boeing or whoever).
namcheapisdumb 9mo ago
> I know blaming everything on LLMs is in vogue right now; but this is much more to do with Microsoft very publically firing the QA department A move no doubt encouraged by c-suites to demonstrate how effective LLMs are in the budget tally.
thewhitetulip 9mo ago
On a contrary note: if LLMs really are that helpful why are QA teams needed? Wouldn't the LLM magically write the best code? Since LLMs have been shoved down everyone's work schedule, we're seeing more frequent outages. In 2025 2 azure outage. Then aws outage. Last week 2 snowflake outages. Either LLMs are not the panacea that they're marketed to be or something is deeply wrong in the industry
- stoneforger 9mo ago
  Why not both? It's not this industry, it's everything. Fuck Jack Welch, fuck the Chicago School.
  - thewhitetulip 9mo ago
    Yes, it is both. If something is forced top down as a productivity spike then it probably isn't one! I remember back in the days when I had to fight management for using Python for something! It gave us a productivity boost to write our tooling in Python. If LLMs were that great since the start, we would have to fight for them.
steve1977 9mo ago
According to Microsoft's top brass, Copilot (one of them) should easily be able to handle QA. So OP's point remains.
fzeindl 9mo ago
> I know blaming everything on LLMs is in vogue right now; but this is much more to do with Microsoft very publically firing the QA department. Yes, yes, "agile" everything... I remember clicking on a perfectly honest button in Azure Dev Ops (Production) and it told me that the button is completed but the actual functionality will be probably delivered in Sprint XY.
razodactyl 9mo ago
So essentially, they need to turn quality around or suffer the thousand cuts of death like Intel? Although. These companies don't "die" - it's more the consumers end up being abandoned in favour of B2B?
debugnik 9mo ago
That was in 2014, doesn't explain the timing of these increasingly common broken patches. I had never gotten as many calls over Windows Update messes from my non-techie family as last year.
- gloosx 9mo ago
  Oh boy, in 2015 Windows 10 was released, and it was extremely broken, including endless reboot loops, vanishing start menu and icons, system freezes, app crashes, file explorer crashes, broken hardware encryption and many broken drivers – so really it was about the same as now. Embracing LLMs and vibe-coding all around made this even worse of course
  - unscaled 9mo ago
    Oh, Yes. Windows 10 had big issues on arrival. But this is also selective Amnesia. The Windows 8 UI was nearly unusable on release. Windows Vista was so legendarily broken on release, that even after it became stable, the majority of technical users refused to give up Windows XP went straight to Windows 7. And even Windows XP that everybody fondly remembers was quite a mess when it came out. Most home users migrated from the Windows 9x line of Windows, so they probably didn't notice the instability so much, but a lot of power users who were already on Windows 2000 held up until SP2 came out. And let's not even talk about Windows ME. The only major Windows version release that wasn't just a point upgrade that was stable in the last century was Window 7 and even then some people would argue this was just a point upgrade for Windows Vista. I'm sure that Microsoft greatly reducing their dedicated QA engineers in 2014 had at least some lasting impact on quality, but I don't think we can blame it on bad releases or bungled Patch Tuesdays without better evidence. Windows 10 is not a good proof for, consider Vista had 10 times as many issues with fully staffed QA teams in the building.
    - firesteelrain 9mo ago
      Speaking of XP. Windows XP SP2 is really when people liked XP. By the time SP2 and SP3 were common, hardware had caught up, drivers were mature, and the ecosystem had adapted. That retroactively smooths over how rough the early years actually were.
boshomi 9mo ago
The shift from an engineer-led corporation to an MBA-led corporation has brought Boeing close to the brink of collapse.
user____name 9mo ago
There seems to be a lot of internal factionalism that's showing up in the final product. I think this is a chromic disease that flares up every couple of years and is then clamped down on... but for whatever reason the lessons are never learned for long.
HumblyTossed 9mo ago
> but this is much more to do with Microsoft very publically firing the QA department[0][1] as a cost savings measure and claiming developers will do their own QA (long before LLMs were on the scene). I will never ever understand this. Development and QA are two different mindsets. You _can_ do both, but you* can't be great at both. * There's always exceptions, yes, yes.
wnevets 9mo ago
> but this is much more to do with Microsoft very publically firing the QA department[0][1] as a cost savings measure and claiming developers will do their own QA (long before LLMs were on the scene). It started in 2014 and the trickle never stopped. We know this was the correct move because Microsoft's stock price has gone up tremendously since 2014, those in the c-suite received massive bonuses and the worlds most efficient system for resource allocation has deemed it so.

Night_Thastus 9mo ago

Microsoft fired their QA because at the end of the day, they are beholden to shareholders. And those shareholders want higher profits. And if you want higher profits, you cut costs. It's not a culture problem. It's a 'being a business' problem, which unfortunately affects all publicly-traded companies.

halapro 9mo ago
Are businesses expected to boom and bust? Cost cutting is fine if you don't kill the company in the process.
- Night_Thastus 9mo ago
  They know MS isn't going anywhere. Windows is too entrenched, users don't care or have feasible alternatives, for a variety of reasons. Plus, MS isn't in the OS business. They're in the data/metrics business.
  - zx8080 9mo ago
    > Plus, MS isn't in the OS business. They're in the data/metrics business. Datadog is. And snowflake. Even Google is. But MS does not like it's centered around data/metrics.
  - tonyedgecombe 9mo ago
    Windows has been losing market share for years now.
  - halapro 9mo ago
    This isn't 2012 anymore, most businesses live in the browser, they couldn't care less what OS they're running. The only reason Windows is still so popular is due to inertia. Ever Excel-centric businesses can use Excel in the browser. While it's true that Microsoft can live without Microsoft, it's still a huge channel. They already lost a whole very lucrative platform (mobile)
rcxdude 9mo ago
Shareholders are, on average, not this activist. A CEO can in fact run a public company with a long-term outlook instead of pumping the numbers for just the next quarter.
- trimethylpurine 9mo ago
  Is that true? I've heard both sides of this. Here is a whole movement that I think believes otherwise: https://votelabor.org/articles/overturning-dodge-v-ford-reclaiming-corporate-power-for-the-people https://votelabor.org/articles/overturning-dodge-v-ford-recl... On the other hand, I've heard conflicting takes from attorneys in the corporate world.
stephen_g 9mo ago
That’s a cop-out though. Company boards are legally required to act in the best interests of shareholders, and plenty of shareholders would agree that running a business in a sustainable way that can deliver profits over the long term is more in their interests than a business trading its future for some short term profits. It’s a cultural problem really, where too many people who study business and economics have been taught this idea that it’s a moral necessity that businesses maximise profit for shareholders (to the point where plenty of people even wrongly believe that’s a legal requirement!), but it’s an ideological position that has only caused once great companies to fail and huge damage to our economies.

mancerayder 9mo ago

The arstechnica article was very good as a history of waterfall v sprint using MS as a case study. However the firing the QA department narrative is not supported: Prior to these cuts, Testing/QA staff was in some parts of the company outnumbering developers by about two to one. Afterward, the ratio was closer to one to one. As a precursor to these layoffs and the shifting roles of development and testing, the OSG renamed its test team to “Quality.” Two QA per dev?? That seems ginormous to me. What am I missing about the narrative about evil corp sending all of QA packing, that seems not supported here? The second, Reuters article seems like it's saying something different than the QA firing narrative - it seems to talk about Nokia acquisition specifically and a smattering of layoffs. Not supporting layoffs or eliminating QA, and I'm deeply annoyed at Windows 11. I just don't see these as supportive of the narrative here that QA is kaput.

ethbr1 9mo ago
> Two QA per dev?? QA is a lot cheaper than dev. If your goal is to make quality software* on a fixed budget, you want to be QA-heavy. * Note: the OS definition of "quality software" drastically differs from your average app.
- pousada 9mo ago
  2 people doing QA per dev seems insane even if it’s a lot cheaper. M$ is hardly know for being obsessed with quality, they’d rather have 2 sales per dev (sales is even cheaper, basically pays for itself)
  - mancerayder 9mo ago
    I've never known M$ to be lacking on the sales front, personally!
  - CrossVR 9mo ago
    It's a lot easier to write code than to make sure it doesn't break something you didn't account for.
  - 9mo ago

ASalazarMX 9mo ago

It has been an MBA company for most of its life. If I had to draw the line, IMO seems Windows 2000 was the last engineer-driven product, and by then it had already developed predatory habits.

Paianni 9mo ago
There's always Windows Server...

Datagenerator 9mo ago

Let's hope for the catastrophic scenario. A world without Microsoft.. no telemetry or backdoors. Please continue on this track to disaster!

anonymars 9mo ago
Accelerationists seem to think the world after a vacuum is going to be some utopia I think more competition is better than less
- windexh8er 9mo ago
  More competitionis better. If you take the market share and revenue off the table and spread that around in a competitive market you'd be in a much more interesting spot with respect to technology advancements. Instead we continue to stagnate with bullshit like Windows 10 --> Windows 11. Windows 11 was never supposed to exist, but $$$$$. There's literally nothing worth paying for in that upgrade. But Microsoft knows it can milk businesses and schools out of ridiculous profits for, essentially, the same garbage and also collude with hardware manufacturers to sell more PCs. [0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/gordonkelly/2015/05/08/microsoft-windows-10-last-windows/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/gordonkelly/2015/05/08/microsof...
  - happymellon 9mo ago
    > There's literally nothing worth paying for in that upgrade. Well there is the violations of Fitts law with the movement of the start button to the centre of the bar? But it does make it look slightly more Mac! They should make sure the next upgrade moves the corner to grab away from the actual corner, and that the cursor change for grabbing it doesn't always trigger if they want to really rip it off.
  - anonymars 9mo ago
    I think Windows 11 in particular is a confluence of two other problems with respect to competition: 1. Subscriptions instead of discrete paid versions removes the incentive to put out a good product. In the past, if the new version was bad it was a direct financial hit. But now there's no direct financial feedback loop, as long as it's not so terrible that you leave the subscription entirely 2. I think Windows 11 is the first time there's no other version of Windows still in support you can use to "ride it out"

miohtama 9mo ago

At least we get Visual Studio Code for free

ljm 9mo ago
Some useful tech has come out of the development of VS Code that every other editor has been able to benefit from but I don’t rate it much as an editor any more. It’s rare for MS to do just the embrace and extend part of EEE, unless Copilot is the latent implementation of ‘extinguish’.
- wooger 9mo ago
  Other than what they're doing to the whole Open Source ecosystem by buying github, stealing all the code for their AI regardless of license, renaming multiple adjacent things to "Github *".
sunaookami 9mo ago
Yeah they baited everyone, blocked Python and C# plugins and then closed down their marketplace to 3rd party editors. Classic EEE tactic.

ferguess_k 9mo ago

I think all companies eventually mutate into a MBA company. For MSFT there was a culture from very early that PMs should lead the project instead of engineers. I read in "Showstoppers" that Cutler was very against of the idea and he pushed back. So that means even in the late 80s MSFT was already a MBA-centered company. The only reason that it has not degraded yet, was because it has not achieved the monopoly position. Once it does it started to chew on its success and quickly degraded into a quasi-feudal economic entity.

themafia 9mo ago

No one is blaming LLMs. Their presence in this situation casts a conspicuous shadow though.

teleportmepls 9mo ago

> Microsoft has a cultural problem; it went from an "engineers" company to an MBA directed one I don’t think this is just Microsoft. Few engineers and visionaries that started these big companies are still at the helm. It’s an opportunity for other companies to take over imo.

oblio 9mo ago
> It’s an opportunity for other companies to take over imo. This is a feeling commonly shared here. I'd like to point out that IBM still dominates the large, billion-dollars worth mainframe market, almost 70 years after it invented it, despite continuous mismanagement for probably 40 years. Microsoft dominates the PC market 40 years after taking it over with MS-DOS, and despite multiple debacles (Windows Millennium, Windows Vista, now Win 11, probably others I'm forgetting). Microsoft dominates the office suite market 30+ years after taking it over with MS Office, despite some huge controversies (the Ribbon still annoys nerds, to this day). More than that, Microsoft has leverage MS Office to become the close second cloud provider after AWS despite starting far behind it. Google and Apple will probably dominate the smartphone and tablet markets for a long time, after taking over those markets 10+ years ago. The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent and a company with a massive moat can outlive most of us. I'd actually turn this on its head by saying that assuming a new comer will topple the incumbent "any day now" is the irrational approach to a market.
- coredog64 9mo ago
  > I'd like to point out that IBM still dominates the large, billion-dollars worth mainframe market Companies continue to pay the IBM tax, but the way IBM writes support contracts incentivizes customers to work very hard at moving workloads to Windows/UNIX. IBM is choosing "Better to reign in [mainframe], then serve in [commodity compute]." (All apologies to John Milton)
- kwanbix 9mo ago
  You are missing 8.0. When Microsoft in its incomparable wisdom decided we needed a tablet OS in the PC.

throwaway85825 9mo ago

There's a great talk that explains how code structure ends up looking like the org chart, and every subsequent organization chart layered on top producing spaghetti code. Windows is now old and full of spaghetti code. Then Microsoft layed off all the expensive seniors who knew the stack and replaced them with cheaper diverse and outsourced staff. Then the people who can't maintain the code use AI and just ship it without any testing. edit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_law

rolandog 9mo ago

Wholeheartedly agree. I can't wait until we can live in a better era where we look back with collective disgust at the blatant white-collar crime time period that was ushered by Friedman and Welch. That, plus the current era, feels to me like a massive dog whistle for people who can't read satirical stories like A Modest Proposal without taking them as instructions.

deleted 9mo ago

[deleted]

joe_the_user 9mo ago

Microsoft has a cultural problem; it went from an "engineers" company to an MBA directed one Every simplistic analysis of failing company X uses a hackneyed cliche like this. But in the case of MS, this is completely ridiculous. MS has been renowned for shitty software, since day one. Bill Gates won the 90s software battle based on monopoly, connections and "first feature to market" tactics. If anything, the heyday of MS quality was the mid 2000s, where it was occasionally lauded for producing good things. But it was never an engineers company (that's Boeing or whoever).

namcheapisdumb 9mo ago

> I know blaming everything on LLMs is in vogue right now; but this is much more to do with Microsoft very publically firing the QA department A move no doubt encouraged by c-suites to demonstrate how effective LLMs are in the budget tally.

thewhitetulip 9mo ago

On a contrary note: if LLMs really are that helpful why are QA teams needed? Wouldn't the LLM magically write the best code? Since LLMs have been shoved down everyone's work schedule, we're seeing more frequent outages. In 2025 2 azure outage. Then aws outage. Last week 2 snowflake outages. Either LLMs are not the panacea that they're marketed to be or something is deeply wrong in the industry

stoneforger 9mo ago
Why not both? It's not this industry, it's everything. Fuck Jack Welch, fuck the Chicago School.
- thewhitetulip 9mo ago
  Yes, it is both. If something is forced top down as a productivity spike then it probably isn't one! I remember back in the days when I had to fight management for using Python for something! It gave us a productivity boost to write our tooling in Python. If LLMs were that great since the start, we would have to fight for them.

steve1977 9mo ago

According to Microsoft's top brass, Copilot (one of them) should easily be able to handle QA. So OP's point remains.

fzeindl 9mo ago

> I know blaming everything on LLMs is in vogue right now; but this is much more to do with Microsoft very publically firing the QA department. Yes, yes, "agile" everything... I remember clicking on a perfectly honest button in Azure Dev Ops (Production) and it told me that the button is completed but the actual functionality will be probably delivered in Sprint XY.

razodactyl 9mo ago

So essentially, they need to turn quality around or suffer the thousand cuts of death like Intel? Although. These companies don't "die" - it's more the consumers end up being abandoned in favour of B2B?

debugnik 9mo ago

That was in 2014, doesn't explain the timing of these increasingly common broken patches. I had never gotten as many calls over Windows Update messes from my non-techie family as last year.

gloosx 9mo ago
Oh boy, in 2015 Windows 10 was released, and it was extremely broken, including endless reboot loops, vanishing start menu and icons, system freezes, app crashes, file explorer crashes, broken hardware encryption and many broken drivers – so really it was about the same as now. Embracing LLMs and vibe-coding all around made this even worse of course
- unscaled 9mo ago
  Oh, Yes. Windows 10 had big issues on arrival. But this is also selective Amnesia. The Windows 8 UI was nearly unusable on release. Windows Vista was so legendarily broken on release, that even after it became stable, the majority of technical users refused to give up Windows XP went straight to Windows 7. And even Windows XP that everybody fondly remembers was quite a mess when it came out. Most home users migrated from the Windows 9x line of Windows, so they probably didn't notice the instability so much, but a lot of power users who were already on Windows 2000 held up until SP2 came out. And let's not even talk about Windows ME. The only major Windows version release that wasn't just a point upgrade that was stable in the last century was Window 7 and even then some people would argue this was just a point upgrade for Windows Vista. I'm sure that Microsoft greatly reducing their dedicated QA engineers in 2014 had at least some lasting impact on quality, but I don't think we can blame it on bad releases or bungled Patch Tuesdays without better evidence. Windows 10 is not a good proof for, consider Vista had 10 times as many issues with fully staffed QA teams in the building.
  - firesteelrain 9mo ago
    Speaking of XP. Windows XP SP2 is really when people liked XP. By the time SP2 and SP3 were common, hardware had caught up, drivers were mature, and the ecosystem had adapted. That retroactively smooths over how rough the early years actually were.

boshomi 9mo ago

The shift from an engineer-led corporation to an MBA-led corporation has brought Boeing close to the brink of collapse.

user____name 9mo ago

There seems to be a lot of internal factionalism that's showing up in the final product. I think this is a chromic disease that flares up every couple of years and is then clamped down on... but for whatever reason the lessons are never learned for long.

HumblyTossed 9mo ago

> but this is much more to do with Microsoft very publically firing the QA department[0][1] as a cost savings measure and claiming developers will do their own QA (long before LLMs were on the scene). I will never ever understand this. Development and QA are two different mindsets. You _can_ do both, but you* can't be great at both. * There's always exceptions, yes, yes.

wnevets 9mo ago

> but this is much more to do with Microsoft very publically firing the QA department[0][1] as a cost savings measure and claiming developers will do their own QA (long before LLMs were on the scene). It started in 2014 and the trickle never stopped. We know this was the correct move because Microsoft's stock price has gone up tremendously since 2014, those in the c-suite received massive bonuses and the worlds most efficient system for resource allocation has deemed it so.