Just a thought, you might like working at https://oxide.computer/. I'd at least interview there before you sign on at MSFT.
Ask HN: Has anyone here worked on the Windows kernel?
41–50 of 174 posts
Re: Ask HN: Has anyone here worked on the Windows kernel?
#42Definitely do not join Microsoft and definitely do not join any windows related teams. Microsoft is hell. Every team is fully siloed. Culture wise it’s a wasteland and teams as a communication platform is awful
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Re: Ask HN: Has anyone here worked on the Windows kernel?
#43Bad stuff:
1. There will be a lot of infrastructure complexity in the kernel, just prepare yourself for that. Even worse bugs! You'll be fixing a lot of bugs, or looking at a lot of bugs, and most of these bugs are from other teams who are interacting with your component! Just order a copy of Windows Internals and get yourself familiar with how thing work.
2. Old ass engineering systems. Just as the interviewers said you will spend a lot of your time waiting for Windows builds.
Good stuff:
1. Work life balance is amazing actually. Most of the time there's very little pressure for you to get work done, as long as you're doing something no one really bothers you.
2. Since you said you hate designing systems, good news, everything has been designed for you! Your, job will mostly be implementing new features for a component.
3. Windbg is actually great and I will die on this hill. You might have to print some debug logs but you won't be looking at metrics because there's whole teams dedicated to doing that stuff. There's also tools which quickly spin up VMs for you to do some live kernel debugging.
Meh stuff:
1. The pay, could be better. That might change soon though.
Re: Ask HN: Has anyone here worked on the Windows kernel?
#44Definitely do not join Microsoft and definitely do not join any windows related teams. Microsoft is hell. Every team is fully siloed. Culture wise it’s a wasteland and teams as a communication platform is awful
Sitting on the Microsoft campus at the moment... not a kernel developer. yeah, this is not hell. Not even a bit.
Microsoft is great. It's an amazing place to make impacts in many different areas of technology. Work teams used to be more siloed, but that's changed a lot in the last 6-7 years. We regularly work across teams at GitHub and Microsoft to get things done with great cooperation.
As for Teams vs. Slack vs. Discord, it's a personal taste thing. I'd rather have Teams over Slack + Zoom 1000x.
Take the Windows kernel job! Worst case, it's not a fit and you move on, like any other job. Best case, you stick around for a long time and have a great career working on tech that 1B+ people use.
When Robert Downey Jr. was trying to talk Gwyneth Paltrow into joining "Iron Man", he said to her something like, "do you want to work on art house films the rest of your life or do you want to be in something that people actually see?"
Windows is massive... it's the largest code base that I'm aware of. It has a ton of process and procedures and test cycles because... it's Windows. Of course you can't just freelance there. But you can "be in something that people actually see", and most SV startups will never even get 1,000 users, much less 1,000,000,000+, and more if you count the users on Azure services using Windows indirectly.
Re: Ask HN: Has anyone here worked on the Windows kernel?
#45Microsoft 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…
Ah, so it is true: https://www.androidpolice.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/08/...
Re: Ask HN: Has anyone here worked on the Windows kernel?
#46Definitely got for it for no other reason to say that you tried it as you'll always regret it if you don't. The only thing worse than not doing it is leaving such a team for the outside world and realizing that's the biggest mistake of your working life.
Re: Ask HN: Has anyone here worked on the Windows kernel?
#47Just a thought, you might like working at https://oxide.computer/ . I'd at least interview there before you sign on at MSFT.
I thought the same thing, simply because Oxide have been very public about their systems programming work. But bcantrill said a few months ago that they're very, very over-subscribed from a hiring perspective [1].
Re: Ask HN: Has anyone here worked on the Windows kernel?
#48I 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…
> I think I can count the number of kernel changes I've submitted on one hand
I know I can; I don't even need any of my fingers.
Re: Ask HN: Has anyone here worked on the Windows kernel?
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't see how the analogy is applicable. To illustrate what I mean, you could have also said: "K8s is like a train. It's big and heavy, will carry most things that you need it to", and it would be just as much of a non sequitur. Analogies are usually worthless to an argument (and therefore should be worthless to your opinions), unless one is able to demonstrate why thinking about an idea with an analogy is applicab…
What pendantry is this? The only thing that you could take away from OP's comment is that they made a metaphor, and since you can make a metaphor about anything, the chosen metaphor says nothing? That's like saying, well, you can use words to construct a lie, therefore, all words are untrustworthy. He's saying that k8s can be powerful, but that that power can be destructive if not wielded correctly. Personally? k8s i…
> But you need a team to manage it,
I do run a kubernetes cluster outside work as a side project and it hardly takes me more than 2 hours per month. It mostly run cloud instance of my open source software for customers and is saving a lot of time compared to the manual process of creating dns manually, rp rules for everyone, handling of SSL, monitoring, ... Just to think about the work that would be required to get all this done outside kubernetes makes me sweat and the maintenance aspect of such a solution would make it even worse.
Re: Ask HN: Has anyone here worked on the Windows kernel?
#50> 2. Debugging exclusively via metrics and logs, since I can't just attach a debugger to a running server.
I’m not sure this is really a difference between kernel and backend service development. You can run the server on a dev machine, attach a debugger, and reproduce the bug. If your problem is you can’t reproduce the bug, you may encounter the same issue when working on the kernel. If someone reports a kernel bug, you may not be able to attach a debugger to their computer, so you will need to reproduce it.