Especially in Microsoft, such old historical projects are a huge huge mess. For Microsoft, never join Windows (anything, not just kernel), Power BI, Office (desktop one). Even many parts of Azure that I witnessed when working there, were already a huge and messy legacy. Colleagues, code and development workflow would be your worst nightmare there.
Ask HN: Has anyone here worked on the Windows kernel?
161–170 of 174 posts
Re: Ask HN: Has anyone here worked on the Windows kernel?
#162Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 c…
Would you mind sharing a link or two to these courses?
MIT 6.033 Computer System Engineering, Spring 2005
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL6535748F59DCA484
MIT 6.172 Performance Engineering of Software Systems, Fall 2018 https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLUl4u3cNGP63VIBQVWguX...
I feel what is underpinning this thread is a job dissatisfaction issues from the ratio between "using other people's software" vs. "writing software for others". The former is inevitably frustrating as I'd become a consumer of software, rather than a creator. Kernel programming, and low-level system engineering in general is more aligned with the latter where you have more creative freedom and less constraints from other people's abstractions. It's like driving an automatic vs. manual car. The latter is just more fun, despite its inefficiency.
Enjoy the courses!
Re: Ask HN: Has anyone here worked on the Windows kernel?
#163Earlier quoted context omitted.
I’m an enormous idiot who’s done that recently. If not for the fact I had another window open, I don’t know what I would have done.
chroot from an OS whose terminal is not broken and a shell other than bash
zsh was the one I broke, so bash would have been preferable.
Re: Ask HN: Has anyone here worked on the Windows kernel?
#164As a former engineer in Windows Core OS team, I can vouch for two topics: kernel code being in great quality and the emphasis Microsoft puts in work and life balance. These two are excellent.
You'll work with people great at their job whom you can learn a lot from.
I also loved having my own window-side private office. I've since heard that Microsoft was trying to adopt open offices, but if it's still there, awesome. Remote work is okay too of course.
Re: Ask HN: Has anyone here worked on the Windows kernel?
#165Earlier quoted context omitted.
So what you do in that case, add a monochrome adapter to the PC and write to the screen memory. Or send [greatly abbreviated] trace out a serial port.
In at least one instance of breaking my tools with my tools, the machines in question were in a data-center. Ordinarily one might be able to grab debugging output over an NC-SI link, but that only works if the breakage doesn't also unexpectedly crash your NIC firmware...
If you can’t touch it, you might not be able to debug it. Kudos though for testing^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hdebugging in production.
Re: Ask HN: Has anyone here worked on the Windows kernel?
#166Earlier quoted context omitted.
In at least one instance of breaking my tools with my tools, the machines in question were in a data-center. Ordinarily one might be able to grab debugging output over an NC-SI link, but that only works if the breakage doesn't also unexpectedly crash your NIC firmware...
If you can’t touch it, you might not be able to debug it. Kudos though for testing^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hdebugging in production.
Case in point. Had a client in the late 80’s with an X.25 connection between their office and a Mainframe across town. It was accumulating hundreds of CRC errors per minute. Couldn’t fix remotely so I flew out there. Had a scope hooked up on both sides.
We loaded the connection in varying patterns for about an hour. ZERO CRC errors. Scratching our heads, we decided to punt. Then suddenly the CRC error count started climbing on my scope. I shout into the speakerphone, excitedly, what did you all just do? They’re like “nothing but unplug the scope from the patch panel”. “Please plug it back in”. CRC error count stopped.
Diagnosis: faulty patch panel.
Re: Ask HN: Has anyone here worked on the Windows kernel?
#167If you're miserable in your job now then switching seems like there's lots of upside and only a little downside (it could potentially be worse than current). The main thing I'd consider in this is the work/life balance. Will it allow the same stellar level of that? People vary in their priorities. For some it's interesting/fun problems to solve, for some it's impact, but for me it's work/life balance, presuming of co…
Is work/life balance a US thing? In my country, for example, the employer can't easily make you work for longer than 8 hours per day, and even then there are big big compensations like extra payment with time off, restrictions on how much overtime per year is allowed and so on. So when people speak of a bad life/work balance, how does that happen in the first place?
Salaried office workers receive far poorer wage and hour protections in the U.S. than you may be used to. Overtime above 40 hours per week is often unpaid, as is the case at Microsoft, and no amount of paid vacation is guaranteed by law. (Workers paid hourly do get overtime pay at 1.5 times the normal wage or higher.)
Microsoft's work/life balance is good in my experience; managers respect your time, product deadlines rarely or never cause long-hour rushes, and if your role lacks an on-call rotation then you won't be woken up in the middle of the night. But other companies may be far worse, and Microsoft is big enough that one person's experience never truly generalizes.
For time off in particular, as of my last experience 2 years ago, MSFT's US policy on paid time off was stingy by American tech company standards:
* There is no scheduled period of the year where everyone gets paid time off. (LinkedIn has 2 such weeks a year but it manages its HR independently of the rest of Microsoft.)
* You accumulate 3 weeks of vacation PTO per year of work for your first 6 years at the company, then 4 weeks per year for years 7-12, then 5 weeks per year for years 13+.
* Unused vacation days expire at the end of the calendar year following the calendar year in which you accumulated them.
* When you leave the company, you get a "vacation cash-out:" you are paid a lump sum equal to all your unused, unexpired vacation days.
* In addition to vacation, each calendar year you get 2 weeks of paid sick leave and 2 "floating holidays" to use like vacation days.
For comparison, at Google you accumulate 4 weeks of vacation per year starting just in year 2, while at Netflix and many smaller companies you get unlimited vacation at the cost of no cash-out.
In practice, there is more leeway at Microsoft on PTO than this policy allows. Even when I had an otherwise poor relationship with my manager, they still looked the other way when I went on Christmas/New Year's week vacation without filing an absence request or using up my vacation days. And I have heard of divisions where after a particularly stressful and overtime-heavy year, the division Vice President told everyone to take such an off-the-books holiday vacation.
Re: Ask HN: Has anyone here worked on the Windows kernel?
#168Earlier quoted context omitted.
In at least one instance of breaking my tools with my tools, the machines in question were in a data-center. Ordinarily one might be able to grab debugging output over an NC-SI link, but that only works if the breakage doesn't also unexpectedly crash your NIC firmware...
If you can’t touch it, you might not be able to debug it. Kudos though for testing^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hdebugging in production.
When your job is to build infrastructure, "in a data-center" does not necessarily mean it's a production server :)
Re: Ask HN: Has anyone here worked on the Windows kernel?
#169I think I can count the number of kernel changes I've submitted on one hand, but I work on core virtualization that involves a lot of pretending to be hardware and (these days) a lot of poking directly at hardware registers. I would say James Mickens sums things up nicely in "The Night Watch[0]." For example, you mention debugging with logs and metrics -- this snippet came to mind: “Yeah, that sounds bad. Have you ch…
Thank you for posting that. Epic read, amazing sense of humor, and I feel like I owe James a beer or three after reading it.
Re: Ask HN: Has anyone here worked on the Windows kernel?
#170Here's my thoughts based on working on Windows in-box code (user mode only, though) across 2 different Windows component teams, totaling about 5 years with a break in the middle. (Split into multiple comments for readability. Some parts removed because other people said it better.) Most importantly, MAKE SURE YOU KNOW WHAT THE JOB IS! Microsoft people don't try to be dishonest, but there can be misunderstandings betw…
One reason I specifically suggest you confirm what your job is is that the teams that work on Windows in-box kernel-mode components aren't just Windows-specific teams anymore. They are part of the Microsoft Azure Edge + Platform division. That name is misleading, but only partly so: shipping the Windows desktop and Windows Server products are a major part of that division's mission, but so is building Microsoft's int…
It's also possible that you could be working in a department that focuses on writing bug fixes for released versions of Windows, instead of writing features and fixes for the next version. The bug-fix department will often be called something like "servicing" or "sustained engineering" (I believe it's currently called Windows Servicing and Delivery, or WSD).