This reads like it was written by the Cleverest Person in the Room. I have to use Azure Devops at work, and some of the critique of Azure rings true for me, but the author-centric presentation was quite off-putting.
Sorry you felt like that.
Decisions that eroded trust in Azure – by a former Azure Core engineer
381–390 of 697 posts
Re: Decisions that eroded trust in Azure – by a former Azure Core engineer
#382I highly sympathize with the author and as a former user of Azure I agree it's a terrible mess.
However, the author has committed magnificent career suicide. If you are in a dysfunctional environment you don't go from issue to issue and escalate each one, proactively finding problematic issues.
You rather find the underlying issues (e.g. crashes not assigned) prioritize them and fix them.
By constantly whistle blowing on separate issues to as high as the board, he is not trying to improve by evolution but by revolution and in revolutions heads roll
Re: Decisions that eroded trust in Azure – by a former Azure Core engineer
#383Earlier quoted context omitted.
[flagged]
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.
"While some may see this as a dick move and I wasn’t exactly proud of it, but I actually waited for Daniel’s wife, Katie, to go into labor before bringing all of this up with his management."
Holy cow! Now I've unfortunately witnessed some ugly office behavior too, but this is quite another level.
Re: Decisions that eroded trust in Azure – by a former Azure Core engineer
#384> Cutler’s intent was to produce a system with the same level of quality, unshakable reliability, and attention to detail he was famous for in his work on VMS and NT. I'm not sure whether this is serious or irony.
Search VMS stability, I think the consensus is clear.
Then Google VMS longest uptime, and the record is 28 years. VMS often achieved five nines over 10 years (99.999%) so no irony.
He took a bunch of folks with him from DEC to Microsoft to make NT, and of course his principles.
Nowadays NT is bomb-proof believe it or not.
Most of the crashes are in device drivers and some rare times in the UI code (Win32k) that should not be there, but the kernel itself is solid.
(Yes I am a big fan)
Re: Decisions that eroded trust in Azure – by a former Azure Core engineer
#385I 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…
> first cover everything with tests
Beware this goal. I'm dealing with the consequences of TDD taken way too far right now. Someone apparently had this same idea.
> management who do not fully understand the problem nor are incentivized to understand it
They are definitely incentivized to understand the problem. However the developers often take it upon themselves to deceive management. This happens to be their incentive. The longer they can hoodwink leadership, the longer they can pad their resume and otherwise play around in corporate Narnia.
It's amazing how far you can bullshit leaders under the pretense of how proper and cultured things like TDD are. There are compelling metrics and it has a very number-go-up feel to it. It's really easy to pervert all other aspects of the design such that they serve at the altar of TDD.
Integration testing is the only testing that matters to the customer. No one cares if your user service works flawlessly with fake everything being plugged into it. I've never seen it not come off like someone playing sim city or factorio with the codebase in the end.
Re: Decisions that eroded trust in Azure – by a former Azure Core engineer
#386The personal account makes a lot of sense, although I could easily see why the OP was not successful. Even if you are an excellent engineer, making people do things, accept ideas, and in general hear you requires a completely different skill altogether - basically being a good communicator. The second thing is that this series of blog posts (whether true or not, but still believable) provides a good introduction to v…
OP was not successful because they didn't want to fix the problems he discussed. I have been in the same exact situation, and no level of communication skills would have been successful in changing their minds.
Or they did, but they needed/wanted to do something else more.
That's usually based on either (a) more perspective, or (b) lack of foundational depth.
Re: Decisions that eroded trust in Azure – by a former Azure Core engineer
#387The "no one at Microsoft, not a single soul, could articulate why up to 173 agents were needed to manage an Azure node" really stuck with me. You have to wonder how many other parts of the code lack ownership and are in there just because no one knows what will happen if you take them out.
Re: Decisions that eroded trust in Azure – by a former Azure Core engineer
#388Reading through this reminded me of just how engulfed in acronyms and lingo MS engineers must be. Much like AWS engineers with an acronym for every service that gets thrown around with the assumption of understanding, I felt like I needed a dictionary of those just to understand what was going on.
Re: Decisions that eroded trust in Azure – by a former Azure Core engineer
#389I see that it's fashionable to bash everything MS related in HN, but let's not pretend that the other major cloud providers don't have their own problems (e.g. https://www.ft.com/content/7cab4ec7-4712-4137-b602-119a44f77... or https://blog.barrack.ai/google-gemini-api-key-vulnerability/). We have had a couple of critical services hosted on Azure over ten years already, call me lucky, but we haven't had any major incidents. That said, the AI Foundry side is broken garbage at the moment, but so is also AI stuff from other providers.
Re: Decisions that eroded trust in Azure – by a former Azure Core engineer
#390> Cutler’s intent was to produce a system with the same level of quality, unshakable reliability, and attention to detail he was famous for in his work on VMS and NT. I'm not sure whether this is serious or irony.
Search VMS stability, I think the consensus is clear. Then Google VMS longest uptime, and the record is 28 years. VMS often achieved five nines over 10 years (99.999%) so no irony. He took a bunch of folks with him from DEC to Microsoft to make NT, and of course his principles. Nowadays NT is bomb-proof believe it or not. Most of the crashes are in device drivers and some rare times in the UI code (Win32k) that shoul…
VMS, yes. No doubts.
NT, no. Again, no doubts.