5 ms·
Microsoft employ over 100,000 engineers. I'd advise against assuming that everything produced by any of them is bad because of bugs in Windows.
by simonw 9mo ago
Microsoft employ over 100,000 engineers. I'd advise against assuming that everything produced by any of them is bad because of bugs in Windows.
- lysace 9mo agoThis is also still small/unimportant enough not to be poisoned by their broken corporate culture.
- replooda 9mo agoThe criticism was directed at the company's product, not the employees...
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- trimethylpurine 9mo agoThe response appears to be pointing out that with so many employees (engineers), it's unlikely that they all work on Windows.
- mcmcmc 9mo agoAnd yet they still work for a company that has shown it isn’t overly concerned about quality or reliability in its products.
- 1f60c 9mo agoThaaat's capitalism
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- trimethylpurine 9mo agoI don't think people typically have so much choice about it. Everyone is just trying to feed their families and enjoy their life. The job market is a little tough right now, I think, for software engineers. No? I know a few personally that left their stable job to be hired and fired in the same month and remain unemployed six months later. Very sad.
- mcmcmc 9mo agoWhat a ridiculous excuse. People who join ICE to brutalize minorities and protestors are just trying to feed their families too, then. No? Working for Microsoft doesn’t make them bad engineers or bad people, but it does make them Microsoft employees. And they get to bear its reputation whether they want to or not. If it makes them uncomfortable then they should make a change or grow thicker skin. Oversaturation of the labor supply for software engineers has been looming for a while now. Gen Z was sold on infinite growth in the ZIRP era which was never going to happen, but everyone still jumped in. What we’re seeing is structural unemployment. Not everyone’s gonna make it.
- trimethylpurine 9mo agoDo you have kids? If not, I agree with you. Make the hard decision and take a loss. And thank you for your sacrifice. If you do, I can't agree with you. Also I wouldn't compare software development for a marketing company with a violent disagreeable effort. There's bad and there's worse, objectively. Anyway, not saying you're wrong, but I'm not so quick to judge someone by a job that they probably hate. Or to wrap 100,000 people in the same blanket. We're all individuals. No one should be judged by the actions of others.
- bionsystem 9mo agoThere are companies I wouldn't candidate for, even with kids I think, although it's hard to say, I don't have kids, and apparently there is a mind-shift happening when you get one. Oracle, Palantir come to mind. But maybe not Microsoft, I don't know about that one. It's probably bad, but maybe not "I prefer to watch my kids starving" kind of bad.
- replooda 9mo agoMaybe. But interpreting it thus requires too much charitableness for it not to have been uncharitable, whether intentionally or otherwise.
- trimethylpurine 9mo agoYou mean interpreting it honestly. Yeah. I caught that.
- sharts 9mo agoDon’t the best of the best typically work on OS fundamentals though?
- trimethylpurine 9mo agoWhich developer has the best of the best on operating systems?
- vlovich123 9mo agoOS is such a broad term, especially when applied to Windows which is closer to a Linux distro. Is it the kernel? Windows is fine there as by all accounts the issues are higher up. They’ve had some problems with their update process which is surprising - historically that team would have been populated by the better engineers. most of the other problems have been in the shell and UI where good engineering discipline is not to be quite as expected.
- bionsystem 9mo agoMaybe not, there are plenty of hard things to do at Microsoft scale, hypervisors (which I guess could count as "OS" but maybe not "Windows" in the consumer-product line sense), compilers, languages, hardware since Microsoft is doing that too, browsers (although the hard part is chrome-based, probably they contribute to it), databases, distributed systems for cloud products, etc. Plenty of hard things to do.
- wongarsu 9mo agoThe windows kernel is great. It's the stuff built on top of that that sucks. I doubt MS puts the best of the best on coding the start menu
- mavhc 9mo agoYes, but the OS fundamentals are for Azure first, Windows last. Azure makes money, 50% of Windows computers are basically free and need to get you to sign up for a subscription some how. The other 50% are Windows Pro/Enterprise, but MS assumes they'll get that money forever so doesn't put any resources into that. In 10 years the kids switching to Linux on desktop today will be in charge of the business deals and switch corporations to linux because they're not scared of it like the current business IT leaders
- ray_v 9mo agoI always wish that people would make this distinction more often ... the people=good, the product=bad ... people!=bad
- replooda 9mo agoIf product->quality_x, I'm okay with employee->?quality_x — but not with either employee->quality_x or employer->!quality_x. A better thing to remember is that people have themselves to feed. Of those 100k engineers, how many can say "no, you don't, Satya, ain't no besmirching my code with slop"?
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- workfromspace 9mo agoNot op, and I generally agree with your assumption but not for Microsoft, as I don't think it's limited to Windows: Teams, Office (especially online), One Drive, SharePoint, Azure, GitHub, LinkedIn, all became very shitty and partially unusable with increasing number of weird bugs or problems lately.
- zx8080 9mo agoBut M$ share price goes up! Investors are smart as they are rich! And they do believe in this all! /sarcasm
- ymck 9mo agoAnd it's not just Microsoft. Apple and other are having the same issue. Something fundamental seems to have happened post Covid but before AI. WFH, flood of Dev hiring, increasingly hostile worker relations, a bunch of web 2.0 folks finally retiring, VC money drying up... take your pick. Software is just crappy these days.
- hulitu 9mo ago> Something fundamental seems to have happened It just became more visible: testing _is_ expensive and time consuming.
- ddtaylor 9mo agoThey seem to be alienating a lot of their users right now in a lot of different products. There's a significant surge in open source software right now and Linux and all the people that are coming over are a bit more than usual. Their customer base seems tired of the game.
- dvfjsdhgfv 9mo agoThe problems with Windows today have nothing to do with bugs but with the strategic vision of Nadella.
- jzb 9mo agoAnd it’s the employees that’ll be laid off if the strategy doesn’t succeed because they just didn’t copilot hard enough or something.
- solarkraft 9mo agoThis is not about individual employees. It’s in the nature of being an employee to be beholden to what’s incentivized by their company’s management and structure.
- sharts 9mo agoDon’t employees have any say in some of the design , implementation, and quality bar? Management folks are employees as well. But perhaps they prefer the paycheck to voicing concerns around bad decisions. Nothing wrong with that but throwing all the blame on faceless management and structure seems not right since it evolves from collective activities.
- solarkraft 9mo ago“Show me the incentives and I’ll tell you the outcome” is exactly about this situation. People who do what they feel is right may be able to do so as long as it doesn’t conflict with company policy, but when it does (say you spend a little more time on perfecting a feature), it gets noticed and eventually corrected.
- petterroea 9mo agoSkilled engineers in an environment that doesn't care about quality may become dull, or simply be forced by the system they are in to not care. In practice they are just like us and so I assume they would find outlets in their free time. I haven't spoken to a Microsoft developer in a while because there are few in the hacker communities I'm around (go figure?) so not entirely sure though. I want to understand.
- bonesss 9mo agoThese giant firms aren’t uniform monoliths, especially MS. Microsoft has some clear ‘A’ teams (compilers, industry leading languages, F*, pioneering web tech, OS innovations, etc), but also ‘B’, ‘C’ and ‘D’ teams, and MS is often reactively chasing industry trends. They’re industry leaders, but also victims of their Office, Windows, and Cloud teams pooping on one another at critical market junctures. In .Net land we can inspect their library code. A number of these ‘Enterprise’ packages around their ‘Enterprise’ solutions are … just passable. Often something you’d write a proper version of to avoid clear issues. When our juniors are delivering better than their official offerings, in light of wizardry being displayed elsewhere, I think we are seeing systematic effects of corporate culture and customer base.
- LatencyKills 9mo agoI spent 15 years as a senior dev on the Visual Studio team followed by 5 years on the Xcode team at Apple. Individual engineers can be talented, professional, and end-user focused. Most of that effort gets lost when PMs refuse to work with each other in a coherent manner. Most of the major issues we ran into weren’t engineering bugs per se, they were the result of management refusing to allow teams to communicate effectively. When we were first building out the original C# functionality, the C# team refused to talk to the existing compiler teams. I spent more time acting as a go-between than I did solving actual technical problems. Good people can produce crappy software in that environment.