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

isolveproblems.substack.com

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

#231

Post by derwiki »

com2kid wrote: post #190
vintagedave wrote: post #9

What are we reading here? These are extraordinary statements. Also with apparent credibility. They sound reasonable. Is this a whistleblower or an ex employee with a grudge? The appearance is the first. Is it? They’ve put their name to some clear and worrying statements. > On January 7, 2025… I sent a more concise executive summary to the CEO. … When those communications produced no acknowledgment, I took the customa…

> 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 wh…

Antivirus wasn’t mandatory in 2007 after the 2003 Blaster Worm, that required no user action to compromise the PC? Wild

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

#232

Post by pratyushnair01 »

jmogly wrote: post #111
Manouchehri wrote: post #96

I've seen Azure OpenAI leak other customer's prompt responses to us under heavy load. https://x.com/DaveManouchehri/status/2037001748489949388 Nobody seems to care.

This is insane, when you say azure OpenAI, do you mean like github copilot, microsoft copilot, hitting openai’s api, or some openai llm hosted on azure offering that you hit through azure? This is some real wild west crap!

I have noticied a similar bug on Copilot. I noticed a chat session with questions that I had no recollection of asking. I wonder if it's related. I brushed it off as the question was generic.

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

#233

Post by CalRobert »

plantain wrote: post #76

I just do not understand how Azure has the scale it does. You only need to login and click around for a bit to see this is not a coherent system designed by competent people. Let alone try and actually build something on it. Who are the customers? Who is buying this shit?

No idea but I think it's in half or more of the job ads I see in the Netherlands. I don't get it.

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

#234

Post by shake_head_pig2 »

rk06 wrote: post #207
axelriet wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for the free psychology assessment, I appreciate it, but I believe I’m fine. The series omits lots of details.

Hi, I hope you are doing good. From my personal experience, complaining about your manager to skip level manager is called Career Suicide. There is nothing good that can come out of it,, except getting fired.

[dead]

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

#235

Post by guardiangod »

axelriet wrote: post #172
outworlder wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Microsoft is the go to solution for every government agency, FEDRAMP / CMMC environments, etc. I've been involved with FEDRAMP initiatives in the past. That doesn't mean as much as you'd think. Some really atrocious systems have been FEDRAMP certified. Maybe when you go all the way to FEDRAMP High there could be some better guardrails; I doubt it. Microsoft has just been entrenched in the government, that's all. Th…

Thanks. That was exactly the plan. Full rewrites are extremely risky (see the 2nd System syndrome) as people wrongly assume they will redo everything and also add everything everyone always wanted, and fix all dept, and do it in a fraction of the time, which is delusional and almost always fail. Stepwise modernization is a proven technique.

As someone who had worked adjacent to the functionally-same components (and much more) at your biggest competitor, you have my sympathy.

Running 167 agents in the accelerator? My gawd that would never fly at my previous company. I'd get dragged out in front of a bunch of senior principals/distinguished and drawn and quartered.

And 300k manual interventions per year? If that happened on the monitoring side , many people (including me) would have gotten fired. Our deployment process might be hack-ish, but none of it involved a dedicated 'digital escort' team.

I too have gotten laid off recently from said company after similar situation. Just take a breath, relax, and realize that there's life outside. Go learn some new LLM/AI stuff. The stuff from the last few months are incredible.

We are all going to lose our jobs to LLM soon anyway.

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

#236

Post by derwiki »

CalRobert wrote: post #200

What makes anyone start a new project and think “I know, I’ll use Azure!”? I really don’t get it. Do they have a great sales org? Is it because a phb thinks “well they made Office so it must be good”? I interviewed with a Dutch energy company migrating infra from AWS -to- Azure and I have no idea what would make them do that (aside from inertia, but then why use Azure in the first place?) And for some reason Azure us…

At the startup I worked at in 2023, Azure was considered the only “safe” way to use OpenAI APIs in prod (eg agreements that the data couldn’t be used for training).

Working with Azure was one of the worst parts of that job.

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

#237

Post by InsideOutSanta »

praptak wrote: post #228
branko_d wrote: post #205

I think this is especially problematic (from Part 4 at https://isolveproblems.substack.com/p/how-microsoft-vaporize... ): "The team had reached a point where it was too risky to make any code refactoring or engineering improvements. I submitted several bug fixes and refactoring, notably using smart pointers, but they were rejected for fear of breaking something." Once you reach this stage, the only escape is to first…

This isn't incentivized in corporate environment. Noticed how "the talent left after the launch" is mentioned in the article? Same problem. You don't get rewarded for cleaning up mess (despite lip service from management) nor for maintaining the product after the launch. Only big launches matter. The other corporate problem is that it takes time before the cleanup produces measurable benefits and you may as well get…

This is the root of the issue. For something like Azure, people are nor fungible. You need to retain them for decades, and carefully grow the team, training new members over a long period until they can take on serious responsibilities.

But employees are rewarded for showing quick wins and changing jobs rapidly, and employers are rewarded for getting rid of high earners (i.e. senior, long-term employees).

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

#238

Post by petterroea »

A business man at a prior employer sympathetic with my younger, naive "Microsoft sucks" attitude told me something I remember to this day:

Microsoft is not a software company, they have never been experts at software. They are experts at contracts. They lead because their business machine exceeds at understanding how to tick the boxes necessary to win contract bids. The people who make purchasing decisions at companies aren't technical and possibly don't even know a world outside Microsoft, Office, and Windows, after all.

This is how the sausage is made in the business world, and it changed how I perceived the tech industry. Good software (sadly) doesn't matter. Sales does.

This is why most of Norway currently runs on Azure, even though it is garbage, and even though every engineer I know who uses it says it is garbage. Because the people in the know don't get to make the decision.

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

#239

Post by nvr219 »

axelriet wrote: post #166
RajT88 wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It reminded me of this one: https://wtfmitchel.medium.com/how-to-get-fired-from-microsof... A lot of similarities, except the medium author was not part of PG but support. He also had recently suffered a brain injury.

Before or after publishing his article?

like 5 minutes after.

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

#240

Post by gzread »

GCUMstlyHarmls wrote: post #224
throwaway173738 wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can’t count the number of times the docs have been totally wrong.

Pretty surprised to hear this. I would think (assuming they are LLM written as parent suggests), that MS could throw a large context "pro" LLM at the code base and you should get perfect docs, updated every release? More perfect than a person where I might mistakenly copy/paste or write "Returns 404" but the LLM can probably see actually return a 401. I'm not a stranger to LLMs hallucinating things in responses but I…

Is it your first time using an LLM? No, they generate plausible-sounding bullshit no matter the input. Sometimes that bullshit is useful. Other times it isn't.
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