4 ms·

What are we reading here? These are extraordinary statements. Also with apparent credibility. They sound reasonable. Is this a whistleblower or an ex employee w

• bigbuppo 7mo ago
  The CEO is accountable to the board. If they are derelict in their obligations to the company, that's where you need to raise a stink so they can fix it.
  • ohyoutravel 7mo ago
    Well, yeah, that’s what a board does, but I think the issue is whether it is customary to go to the board directly in this situation. The answer is a resounding NO. Very odd, but cool idea and approach.
    • ryandrake 7mo ago
      Maybe naive, but why not? If it's a serious enough issue, and you're not getting anywhere through your management chain all the way up to the CEO, why is it novel to contact the people the CEO reports to? They're not royalty, they're other human beings who also eat, piss and fart like everyone else.
      • refulgentis 7mo ago
        Before 6 years of Google I’d co-sign what you said, but it never ever plays out that way. The law of the jungle is an iron law, make people around you feel bad, be a tattletale, and you’re choosing to be ostracized. That said yr interlocutor disturbs me a bit because yes, they certainly will make it out to be a mental health episode. But the implicit deal there is “STFU. You can even take paid health leave.” It’s not healthy either. BigCo is insane I’ll never work for one again without outrageous comp. You’d be stunned by even the simplest story. Ex. a year in some crazy shit was going down and my manager asked for my thoughts on a topic, I was honest and basically said “I don’t think it’s a good idea, but in my experience, raising issues involving people only raises more issues.” He swore up and down it wouldn’t be a problem, eventually made a deal I could email it to him privately. Next 1:1 with my area lead was horrible, them seeing red, hearing a mistranslated version of what I said, and I had 0 warning.
        • _zoltan_ 7mo ago
          I guess you're in the US? In Europe I speak up all the time, even to people who are not in Europe. (Usual disclaimed that this is my opinion.)
          • refulgentis 7mo ago
            I loved working with Zurich
    • axelriet 6mo ago
      “customary” referred to the path through the Secretary, as opposed to writing to individual members. I added a clarification at the bottom of the page.
  • dartharva 7mo ago
    Yeah but I can't conceive a world where a Board would care about technical complaints from an employee about engineering decisions several levels downstream of the CEO's executive domain.
• ZeroCool2u 7mo ago
  In my experience Azure is full of consistency issues and race conditions. It's enough of an issue that I was talking about new OpenAI models becoming available via Bedrock on AWS and how convenient that was since I wouldn't have to deal with Azure and my colleague in enterprise architecture went on an unprompted rant about these exact issues. It's not the first time something like this has happened and I've experienced these issues first hand, so yes. I'd say reliability is a critical issue for Azure and it hasn't gotten better each time I've gone back to check.
• zipy124 7mo ago
  Yes it is that unreliable. Even when given free credits, I would rather pay for the offerings from Amazon/Google.
• lokar 7mo ago
  He is, I think, Swiss, perhaps a cultural difference?
  • axelriet 7mo ago
    We like things well done, but also integrity and accountability.
    • ninjagoo 7mo ago
      >> He is, I think, Swiss, perhaps a cultural difference? > We like things well done, but also integrity and accountability. Unless they involve secret bank accounts [1], refugees [2], and/or nazis [3] :-) All props to you, though, for speaking out. This is going to help a lot of folks understand why things are going the way they are with Azure, and MS. [1] https://www.theguardian.com/news/2022/feb/22/how-swiss-banking-secrecy-global-financial-system-switzerland-tax-elite https://www.theguardian.com/news/2022/feb/22/how-swiss-banki... [2] though in fairness, it appears to be changing, but we shall see. https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/culture/how-switzerland-s-views-on-refugees-have-evolved/47566026 https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/culture/how-switzerland-s-views... [3] https://www.theguardian.com/world/1999/dec/11/1 https://www.theguardian.com/world/1999/dec/11/1
      • axelriet 6mo ago
        Everyone is entitled to their opinion.
• pRusya 7mo ago
  Azure is when you have a different version of the same product/api in each region.
• rando1234 7mo ago
  I recall seeing some pretty damning reports from a security pentester that was able to escape from a container on Azure and found the management controller for the service was years old with known critical unpatched vulnerabilities. Always been a bit sceptical of them since then
  • twisteriffic 7mo ago
    A decent portion of Azure Web Apps internals hasn't moved past .net core 2.3
• convexly 7mo ago
  Large orgs make decisions that prioritize short-term metrics over long-term quality all the time and nobody tracks whether those tradeoffs actually paid off. The decision to ship fast and fix later sounds reasonable in a meeting setting until articles like this surface and the reality comes through clearly.
  • egorfine 7mo ago
    > sounds reasonable in a meeting setting until articles like this surface No. It sounds reasonable past that. Because shipping features will make shareholders happy while an article like this will change nothing.
    • aswegs8 7mo ago
      Microsoft Azure holds 20% of global cloud infrastructure market, 2nd largest behind AWS. Seems to be working.
• chasd00 7mo ago
  Yeah I thought that was extreme. An engineer going to the board of any corporation let alone Microsoft is not normal or customary IME. That could explain why they got no response.
  • axelriet 7mo ago
    Not on day one. Imagine it took two years to get there.
  • jtbayly 7mo ago
    When you see significant risks to the org and its value, and they go completely unaddressed by management, the board is the final step before going to the public. It is the board’s duty to the public owners to make sure management isn’t driving the company into the ground. It would be interesting to see this raised in the next shareholders meeting as a question of whether the board and exec team are actually competent and doing their work. A man can dream anyway. When there is this much money on the line, sometimes people actually get held somewhat accountable.
  • everdrive 7mo ago
    It's a baffling flaw in human nature. The board should have cared about these issues, but in practice communications to and from the board are tightly controlled, and communications outside of those constraints are discarded. This occurs whether or not it makes sense. Machiavelli actually warns about the specifically: if someone else controls access to you and communication with you, they have real leverage over you.
  • axelriet 6mo ago
    “customary” referred to the path through the Secretary, as opposed to writing directly to members. Besides that, depending on the nature of the communication, if everything fails, you may need to be sure you talk to people who will unconditionally put the best interests of the company ahead of any other consideration. The Board is one such group. See what Boeing did with the report of the mechanic who saw flaws in the 737 MAX’s door plugs. Was that worthy of a letter to the CEO, then the Board if no reaction? Or just talk to your dismissive manager and let the planes crash? I made a judgment call, which I entirely own.
• bumblehean 7mo ago
  >Is Azure really this unreliable? There are concrete numbers in this blog. For those who use Azure, does it match your external experience? IME, yes. I'm currently working as an SRE supporting a large environment across AWS, Azure, and GCP. In terms of issues or incidents we deal with that are directly caused by cloud provider problems, I'd estimate that 80-90% come from Azure. And we're _really_ not doing anything that complicated in terms of cloud infrastructure; just VMs, load balancers, some blob storage, some k8s clusters. Stuff on Azure just breaks constantly, and when it does break it's very obvious that Azure: 1. Does not know when they're having problems (it can take weeks/months for Azure to admit they had an outage that impacted us) 2. Does not know why they had problems (RCAs we're given are basically just "something broke") 3. Does not care that they had problems Everyone I work with who interacts with Azure at all absolutely loathes it.
  • chris_money202 7mo ago
    But doesn’t this experience contradict what OP is saying in a way. If azure is always breaking wouldn’t that imply that changes like “adding smart pointers” are being introduced into the codebase?
    • andyg_blog 7mo ago
      I don't think it contradicts the OP. OP says the system is unreliable. Memory leaks that lead to out of memory failures for example. Smart pointers would stabilize things. (Also note that OP says their smart pointers PR was rejected).
      • chris_money202 7mo ago
        That's a generalized statement. Smart pointers can stabilize things, if used wrongly they can cause just as many issues. Sprinkling in smart pointers such that there is now mixed use with smart and raw pointers can cause double frees, and huge maintenance issues. So, creating a single PR to introduce smart pointers in my opinion is not necessarily "stability". He should have created an architecture plan and got upstream and downstream aligned.
• VladVladikoff 7mo ago
  I am sort of confused how NDA and such agreements employees sign would allow for an employee to post such an article without being sued by Microsoft?
  • justinclift 7mo ago
    If they can swing it as legit whistleblowing somehow, they might be ok.
  • axelriet 7mo ago
    Interesting point. Time will tell.
  • rk06 7mo ago
    Most likely, the author was let go in mass layoff, and they forgot about NDA.
    • decimalenough 7mo ago
      NDAs are usually signed when you join the company, not leave it. Signing a non-disparagement agreement is often a condition for receiving severance, although I'm not sure what MSFT's policy on this is.
  • HighGoldstein 7mo ago
    Wild guess, touching this with a 10-foot pole risks validating his claims. If they sue for breach of NDA, it means his claims are factually correct, and if they sue for libel and it goes to court, they may be forced to submit documents they don't want to.
• cjbgkagh 7mo ago
  As a former MSFTy it does sound weird to me too. I didn’t see what Axels level was but a lot of people work for Microsoft and not many of them can expect to email the CEO and get a response. It seems a bit like a crash out, not the first I’ve seen levied at Azure, won’t be the last. They probably think it’s a mental health episode, if you’re an important CEO crazy people will email you all the time and the staff probably filter them out before they see it. Also this is a lot of internal gossip, I would be worried that airing this publicly would impinge on future career opportunities, even healthy orgs would appreciate some discretion. I’m sure everything he said is completely true, Azure is one of the few tech stacks I refuse to work with and the predominant reason I left. If you’ve joined an org and nothing works the reason is usually that the org is dysfunctional and there is often very little you can do about it, and you’re probably not the first person who’s tried and failed at it.
  • tinco 7mo ago
    Never worked at a FAANG, but from what I read from their cultures I don't think a letter to the CEO from a senior engineer would go entirely unnoticed there. CEO's might receive crazy letters, but hopefully not regularly from their senior engineering staff..
    • cjbgkagh 7mo ago
      Microsoft has a large PR department to put out such false impressions. The culture has changed, AFAIK you used to be able to email Bill Gates and be fairly confident he would read it, but you better be sure it was worth reading or he would fire you. Now they’re unlikely to fire you but they’re unlikely to read it either. Senior leadership seems to be more far sequestered now, a bit like Trump, surrounded by lackeys giving them an entirely false impression of the world. That’s how they could legitimately believe they were going to bury the IPhone.
    • gigel82 7mo ago
      A "Senior Software Engineer" at Microsoft is someone with a pulse and 3 years of experience (due to title inflation); so despite the "senior" in the title definitely not "senior engineering staff".
• com2kid 7mo ago
  > What are we reading here? These are extraordinary statements. Also with apparent credibility. I left Microsoft in 2014. Already back then I could see this sort of stuff starting to happen. The Office Org was mostly immune from it because they had a lot of lifers, people who had been working on the same code for decades and who thought through changes slowly. But even by 2014 there were problems hiring developers who knew C++, or who wanted to learn it. COM? No way. One one team we literally had to draw straws once to determine who was going to learn how to write native code for Windows. It wasn't even a talent thing, Windows development skills are a career dead end outside of Microsoft. They used to be a hot commodity, and Microsoft was able to hire the best of the best from industry. Now they have to train people up, and Microsoft doesn't offer any of the employment perks that they used to use to attract top talent (Seattle used to be a low CoL area, everyone had private offices, job stability). When I started at Microsoft in 2007, the interview bar included deep knowledge of how computers worked. It wasn't unusual to have meetings drop down to talking about assembly code. Your first day after orientation was a bunch of computer parts and you were told to "figure out how to setup your box". Antivirus wasn't mandatory. The logic was if you got a virus, they made a mistake hiring you and you deserved to be fired. When your average developer can go that deep on any topic, you can generally leave engineers well enough alone and get good software.
  • derwiki 7mo ago
    Antivirus wasn’t mandatory in 2007 after the 2003 Blaster Worm, that required no user action to compromise the PC? Wild
    • gzread 7mo ago
      Maybe they fired everyone who was working there in 2003. Would explain some things.
    • ptx 7mo ago
      On the other hand there was e.g. CVE-2021-1647 where Microsoft's antivirus would compromise the PC with no user action. (At least I think that's the one I'm thinking of. It's marked as a high-severity RCE with no user interaction but they don't give any details. There was definitely at least one CVE where Windows Defender compromised the system by unsafely scanning files with excessive privileges.)
• axelriet 7mo ago
  What I meant is that it’s customary to write to the Board through the Secretary as opposed to write directly or through some other channel.
  • vintagedave 7mo ago
    Thanks for the direct reply! I wasn’t aware it was ever customary to write to a board. But I do see you have very clear concerns. One thing I don’t fully follow is: how did it get from such a nicely designed system, built by Dave Cutler, to this — simply moving fast and building tech debt?
    • nimonian 7mo ago
      Writing to the board is not customary. When you do so, it is customary to do it through the secretary.
    • darthwalsh 7mo ago
      I was there when the SDET role was eliminated. Our team of 8 SDE and 5 SDET became a team of 8 devs who also owned tons of QA frameworks. It was awful, except each tiny we deleted a test suite for not being valuable; that was awesome! If the Azure org was flooded with senior engineers who did not have senior-level experience architecting production software... That explains a lot.
• Hammershaft 7mo ago
  I notice the title mentions the author is a former employee but he never mentions the terms on which he left.
  • sevenseacat 7mo ago
    at the bottom of part 4 - > The org’s leadership responded with strong defensiveness and denial. Not long afterward, the organization terminated my employment.