Decisions that eroded trust in Azure – by a former Azure Core engineer

I thought he was a PM.

There is a difference between individual packages coming out of a single project (or even a single Cargo workspace) vs them coming out of completely different people.

The former isn't a problem, it is actually desirable to have good granularity for projects. The latter is a huge liability and the actual supply chain risk.

For example, Tokio project maintains another popular library called Prost for Protobufs. I don't think having those as two separate libraries with their own set of dependencies is a problem. As long as Tokio developers' expertise and testing culture go into Prost, it is not a big deal to have multiple packages. Similarly different components of the Tokio itself can be different crates, as long as they are built and tested together, them being separate dependencies is GOOD.

Now to use Prost with a gRPC server, I need a different project: tonic which comes from a different vendor: Hyperium. This is an increased supply chain risk that we need to vet. They use Prost. They also use the "h2" crate. Now, I need to vet the code quality and the testing cultute of multiple different organizations.

I have a firm belief that the actual People >>> code, tooling, companies and even licensing. If a project doesn't have (or retain) visionary and experienced developers who can instill good culture, it will ship shit code. So vetting organizations >> vetting indiviual libraries.

> That entire 122-strong org was knee-deep in impossible ruminations involving porting Windows to Linux to support their existing VM management agents.

> My day-one problem was therefore not to ramp up on new technology, but rather to convince an entire org, up to my skip-skip-level, that they were on a death march.

> I later researched this further and found that no one at Microsoft, not a single soul, could articulate why up to 173 agents were needed to manage an Azure node

This is most corporates. I'm sure this was celebrated as as a successful project and congratulations to everyone, along with big bonuses, RSU, raises, and promotions, mostly to other orgs to bring this kind of 'success' to other projects (or other companies). These people mostly are gone in less than 2 years. They continue to take 'wins'.

The VPs are dumb as shit, but they need 'successful' projects that have fancy names that they can present to their exec team.

The 173 agents are to give wins to a large number of people and teams, all these people contributed to this successful project.

If it continues, there will be a lessons learned powerpoint, followed by 10x growth in headcount, promotions to everyone and double down. 270 people can deliver a baby in 1 day and all that.

I honestly thought this was one of the weaker points of the article.

The OpenAI deal almost certainly related purely to GPU capacity, which had little to do with the article. The layoffs would have happened regardless.

IMO - churn, and generalization is the root cause. Engineers are thrown on projects for a year with little prior experience, leave others to pickup the pieces, etc. There's no longer a sense of ownership, and I'm sure the recent wave of layoffs isn't helping with this.

Even before vide coding this problem existed.

The truth is, only small companies build good stuff. Once a company becomes big enough, the main product that it originally started on is the only good thing that is worth buying from them - all new ventures are bound to be shit, because you are never going to convince people to break out of status quo work patterns that work for the rest of the company.

The only exception to this has been Google, which seems to isolate the individual sectors a lot more and let them have more autonomy, with less focus on revenue.