Decisions that eroded trust in Azure – by a former Azure Core engineer • Hacker News Board

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

#431

Post by pjmlp » Fri, Apr 03, 2026, 12:54 PM UTC

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…

> But even by 2014 there were problems hiring developers who knew C++, or who wanted to learn it. COM? No way.

It doesn't help that there are some teams that are hardcore in keeping things as they are and don't want any tooling that might improve COM development experience.

To this day Microsoft is yet to have any COM related tooling for C++ as easy to use as C++ Builder does it.

MFC, ATL, WRL, WIL,.... you name it.

The only time it seemed they finally got it, with C++/CX, there was a group that managed to kill this product, replace it with C++/WinRT, with no tooling other than the command line IDL compiler, now also abandoned as they refocused into windows-rs.

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

#432

Post by dzonga » Fri, Apr 03, 2026, 12:54 PM UTC

you have a current US president who has never read the Art of War.

likely most company leadership, besides Hedge fund managers, have never read the Art of War either.

this results in management that lacks a strategic focus - they want to win the next battle (down in a valley, while giving the enemy an upper hand to be on the hill).

your infantry (low-level ICs) are smart and capable - and the org is actively pursing means to deskill them via some shit called (A.I) - your colonels (mid-management) are comfortable in their laurels since anyone who raises a voice is shown the door (hell most of them manage people now & don't fight anymore)

then you wonder why the country, the org is losing. but hey at least we posted a massive valuation.

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

#433

Post by steve1977 » Fri, Apr 03, 2026, 12:56 PM UTC

breppp wrote: post #391

petterroea wrote: post #238

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 compani…

That's true for Azure, where contracts are signed due to free credits given over Office and Windows usage. However, there is a reason why everyone uses Office and Windows. Office is the only suite that has the complete feature set (Ask any accountant to move to Google Sheets). Windows is the only system that can effectively run on any hardware (PnP) and have been that way for decades. This is due to superior software…

The selling point of Excel is not the feature set, it's that people know Excel and are usually very resistant to learning something new.

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

#434

Post by steve1977 » Fri, Apr 03, 2026, 12:58 PM UTC

dzonga wrote: post #432

you have a current US president who has never read the Art of War. likely most company leadership, besides Hedge fund managers, have never read the Art of War either. this results in management that lacks a strategic focus - they want to win the next battle (down in a valley, while giving the enemy an upper hand to be on the hill). your infantry (low-level ICs) are smart and capable - and the org is actively pursing…

Why read the Art of War when you wrote (or had ghost-written for you) the Art of the Deal?

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

#435

Post by tremon » Fri, Apr 03, 2026, 12:58 PM UTC

breppp wrote: post #391

petterroea wrote: post #238

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 compani…

That's true for Azure, where contracts are signed due to free credits given over Office and Windows usage. However, there is a reason why everyone uses Office and Windows. Office is the only suite that has the complete feature set (Ask any accountant to move to Google Sheets). Windows is the only system that can effectively run on any hardware (PnP) and have been that way for decades. This is due to superior software…

Windows is the only system that can effectively run on any hardware

...as long as that hardware is Intel-based (and a select few ARM-based boards nowaways). And the reason that it runs on all that hardware is because of Microsoft's business contracts with hardware vendors, not because of their software quality -- that's immaterial, as Microsoft generally does not write the drivers.

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

#436

Post by sidewndr46 » Fri, Apr 03, 2026, 1:01 PM UTC

Some of this reads like parody, for example: "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 really here to take shots at Dave Cutler, but Windows NT was not known for it's unshakeable reliability. If it's known for anything, it is known for lacking any basic security measures. I remember demonstrating to people who joined my WiFi network that I could automatically obtain remote shells on their laptop.

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

#437

Post by cjbgkagh » Fri, Apr 03, 2026, 1:04 PM UTC

tinco wrote: post #267

cjbgkagh wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a former MSFTy it does sound weird to me too. I didn’t see what Axels level was but a lot of people work for Microsoft and not many of them can expect to email the CEO and get a response. It seems a bit like a crash out, not the first I’ve seen levied at Azure, won’t be the last. They probably think it’s a mental health episode, if you’re an important CEO crazy people will email you all the time and the staff prob…

Never worked at a FAANG, but from what I read from their cultures I don't think a letter to the CEO from a senior engineer would go entirely unnoticed there. CEO's might receive crazy letters, but hopefully not regularly from their senior engineering staff..

Microsoft has a large PR department to put out such false impressions. The culture has changed, AFAIK you used to be able to email Bill Gates and be fairly confident he would read it, but you better be sure it was worth reading or he would fire you. Now they’re unlikely to fire you but they’re unlikely to read it either.

Senior leadership seems to be more far sequestered now, a bit like Trump, surrounded by lackeys giving them an entirely false impression of the world. That’s how they could legitimately believe they were going to bury the IPhone.

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

#438

Post by nijave » Fri, Apr 03, 2026, 1:08 PM UTC

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…

The one place I worked that used it - got a bunch of free credits for signing up - had some license agreement for some Microsoft service (Teams Oath App or something similar) where a certain percentage of the infra had to be hosted on Azure

Don't remember the details of #2, just that they were a "Microsoft partner" of some sort which was beneficial to integrating with the Microsoft apps the product depended on and appearing as an app in the marketplace. The company built software that ingested IM/chat data from corporations (Teams and I think something older)

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

#439

Post by varispeed » Fri, Apr 03, 2026, 1:09 PM UTC

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…

I was once in such a position. I persuaded management to first cover the entire project with extensive test suite before touching anything. It took us around 3 months to have "good" coverage and then we started refactor of parts that were 100% covered. 5 months in the shareholders got impatient and demanded "results". We were not ready yet and in their mind we were doing nothing. No amount of explanation helped and they thought we are just adding superficial work ("the project worked before and we were shipping new features! Maybe you are just not skilled enough?") Eventually they decided to scrap whole thing. Project was killed and entire team sacked.

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

#440

Post by jiggawatts » Fri, Apr 03, 2026, 1:10 PM UTC

zdragnar wrote: post #120

jiggawatts wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> People come in all the time crying that everything is broken and needs to be scrapped and rewritten but it's hardly ever true. Or… you’ve just normalised the deviation. One of the few reliable barometers of an organisation (or their products) is the wtf/day exclaimed by new hires. After about three or four weeks everyone adapts, learns what they can and can’t criticise without fallout, and settles into the mud to w…

> One of the few reliable barometers of an organisation (or their products) is the wtf/day exclaimed by new hires. Eh, I don't think this is exactly as reliable as you'd expect. My previous job had a fairly straight forward code base but had fairly poor reliability for the few customers we had, and the WTF portions usually weren't the ones that caused downtime. On the other hand, I'm currently working on a legacy sys…

The rapid decay of WTF/day over time applies to both new employees and new customers.

> currently working on a legacy system

"Legacy" is the magic word here! Those customers are pissed, trust me, but they've long ago given up trying to do anything about it. That's why you don't hear about it. Not because there are no bugs, but because nobody can be bothered to submit bug reports after learning long ago that doing so is futile.

I once read a paper claiming that for every major software incident (crash, data loss, outage, etc...) between only one in a thousand to one in ten thousand will be formally reported up to an engineer capable of fixing the issue.

I refused to believe that metric until I started collecting crash reports (and other stats) automatically on a legacy system and discovered to my horror that it was crashing multiple times per user per day, and required on average a backup restore once a week or so per user due to data corruption! We got about one support call per 4,500 such incidents.