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Ask HN: Has anyone here worked on the Windows kernel?

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Re: Ask HN: Has anyone here worked on the Windows kernel?

#121

Post by Firmwarrior »

greggsy wrote: post #19
Firmwarrior wrote: post #11

Microsoft is a friggin dumpster fire, dude. Some teams are great to work for, but a LOT of them are little crews of treacherous rogues who're only looking out for themselves and always ready to stab someone in the back. You'll run into a lot of the same issues on the Windows kernel that you're getting irritated with in service development land. A lot of infrastructure is already out there, but figuring out how to use…

You basically described any workplace in a large company. Organisations are systems made of loosely interconnected and dependent systems, made up of people. The complexity of business norms, personality and cultural differences, and unrealistic expectations around business processes can be difficult to reign in inside a global company. Some workplaces have worked out a sweet spot, balancing people, HR, tools, culture…

I’ve been at other big companies where it wasn’t the case. The engineers were all there to get a job done and were willing to help other teams when necessary to make that happen, without lengthy negotiations ahead of time

There’s going to be SOME of that stuff any time you have more than one person in the same building, but a decade under the iron fist of Ballmer has permanently ruined Microsoft as an organization.

Re: Ask HN: Has anyone here worked on the Windows kernel?

#122

Post by Firmwarrior »

pjmlp wrote: post #113
Firmwarrior wrote: post #11

Microsoft is a friggin dumpster fire, dude. Some teams are great to work for, but a LOT of them are little crews of treacherous rogues who're only looking out for themselves and always ready to stab someone in the back. You'll run into a lot of the same issues on the Windows kernel that you're getting irritated with in service development land. A lot of infrastructure is already out there, but figuring out how to use…

You forgot NVidia and Adobe, two big hires of well known names in the C++ community and ISO C++ working groups.

That’s a good point, I’ve heard good things about NVidia

Presumably Tesla and Uber must have some “native” code being written somewhere in-house too, and someone mentioned the HFT industry

There are a lot of decent jobs out there that will keep you comfortable, too, even if you can’t bring in 300k+.

Re: Ask HN: Has anyone here worked on the Windows kernel?

#123

Post by greggsy »

notJim wrote: post #30
greggsy wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You basically described any workplace in a large company. Organisations are systems made of loosely interconnected and dependent systems, made up of people. The complexity of business norms, personality and cultural differences, and unrealistic expectations around business processes can be difficult to reign in inside a global company. Some workplaces have worked out a sweet spot, balancing people, HR, tools, culture…

I really disagree with this idea, we shouldn't normalize every workplace being full of back-stabbers and retaliatory jerk managers. Nor is horrible red tape a given, although some bureaucracy is of course required. None of this has been my experience at fairly large, well-known companies, although I'm definitely aware of cases where it has happened to friends.

It’s not an idea - it’s just a perspective that some people forget: the world is volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous, and our organisations are a reflection of that. I know that it’s fashionable to talk about not normalising things, but the reality doesn’t change.

I don’t like it either, but I can’t really do much about it. If you realise you’re in a difficult organisation, you can at least start to take action, or take a different tact (or leave). Being annoyed about the situation is probably just going to make you more and more unhappy because the system won’t (or can’t) change in your desired timeframe.

Re: Ask HN: Has anyone here worked on the Windows kernel?

#124

Post by doctor_eval »

retcon wrote: post #68
EvanAnderson wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As an aside: James Mickens is a treasure. If anybody reading this hasn't read any of his articles or watched any of his talks before stop now and do it. You won't be sorry. https://mickens.seas.harvard.edu/wisdom-james-mickens

Reading this man's homepage he comes across as a insufferable egotist. I couldn't find any trace of didactic value among the self aggrandizing rhetoric not possible to convey with infinitely greater humility and persuasion as well as concision. Edit: reference source decades of being quite intolerable myself. Takes one to know one. And by my experience incredible good fortune and more decades to repent.

Is that you, Mickens?

Re: Ask HN: Has anyone here worked on the Windows kernel?

#125

Post by DaiPlusPlus »

amluto wrote: post #65
ccrush wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you no longer use windbg to attach to a running kernel on a remote box, and debug the remote box from your development machine? I believe that's how kernel debugging is generally done.

(I’m a Linux kernel dev) Tools like windbg probably work great until you are debugging the code that runs when windbg tries to take over. Or you’re debugging something sensitive to interrupts and it’s literally impossible to keep up with a tool like windbg. Or you a debugging something that overwrites windbg in memory because you have a corrupt pointer. Or you triple-fault the machine and it reboots with so much prej…

I thought everyone doing OS/kernel dev would be running code in a VM they can pause, snapshot, and single-step all without a guest debugger?

Re: Ask HN: Has anyone here worked on the Windows kernel?

#127

Post by low_tech_punk »

py_or_dy wrote: post #64

I'm pretty burned out too with my work (mostly web dev stuff). I've been meaning to get "AWS certified" or learn Kubernetes, but like you, it all seems so crazy to me. I used to love old school "linux administration", but this new wave of tech gives me no interest. Curious how you get an offer such as this? I've thought about changing job roles, but I really suck at leet coding so I've never really bothered. I figure…

Feeling the same. Tired of web stack. Don’t want to do Kubernetes. Don’t want to do ML. All I want is descending to lower level programming. Rust would be nice. C would do too. LLVM IR might be my ultimate language. I don’t waste time on Leetcode. I spend most of my free time on side projects on GitHub which helps me build up a portfolio for my next job. I also watch MIT courses to learn system programming. I don’t care about earning a degree. Just watching it for the pleasure of it.

Have you considered applying for entry level jobs of a different domain? As long as you are ok with a pay cut, there is not such thing as over-qualifying.

Re: Ask HN: Has anyone here worked on the Windows kernel?

#128

Post by xmodem »

DaiPlusPlus wrote: post #125
amluto wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(I’m a Linux kernel dev) Tools like windbg probably work great until you are debugging the code that runs when windbg tries to take over. Or you’re debugging something sensitive to interrupts and it’s literally impossible to keep up with a tool like windbg. Or you a debugging something that overwrites windbg in memory because you have a corrupt pointer. Or you triple-fault the machine and it reboots with so much prej…

I thought everyone doing OS/kernel dev would be running code in a VM they can pause, snapshot, and single-step all without a guest debugger?

Virtual machines are used extensively by kernel developers but are not an adequate substitute for real hardware in a lot of situations. After all, one of a kernel's jobs is to abstract away differences in underlying hardware.

Re: Ask HN: Has anyone here worked on the Windows kernel?

#129

Post by anaisbetts »

The Windows Kernel is a quite well-maintained and well-written piece of software. I would say one thing that can be frustrating is that the NT kernel simply does a ton of stuff, and breaking compatibility with all of that stuff is not an option. I once had a one character fix in NLS, that turned into two separate 500+ line AppCompat shims

It leads to code being Complicated, and a lot of Kobayashi Maru situations where there is no good solution to an engineering problem, just a bunch of bad compromises. Depending on your area, you might run into this all the time, or you might not.

Re: Ask HN: Has anyone here worked on the Windows kernel?

#130

Post by jve »

To all the Windows folks out there: Thank you for this wonderful OS :)

I know, it gets a lot of trashing all around, the ads, the ui, the whatever - I like the UI and I really like what it offers me for a technical person: ETW traces, Performance monitor, Event fowarding, PowerShell, Windows Terminal, GPO, Windows Defender with advanced features, Resource Monitor, ACLs (Well, auditing file access could have been better :) ), wf.msc, RSAT, HyperV and whatever features under the hood that enables Process Monitor!, ..., ... ,...

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