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

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

#471

Post by mrsmrtss »

nijave wrote: post #443
mrsmrtss wrote: post #389

I 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 inc…

Their VMs and load balancers mostly work. Their managed services are a crapshoot. We routinely "self hosted" at the company that used Azure to ensure some semblance of stability. For instance, our Patroni clusters were much more performant and stable than Azure Single Server Postgres (what a terrible product...).

Maybe this is why they retired Single Server PostgreSQL and are now offering only the new Azure Database for PostgreSQL (flexible server). Zero problem with the latter for us so far.

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

#472

Post by ninjagoo »

A tale as old as corporations. Corporate Ladders optimize for Ladder-Climbers, rather than Management Skills or Technical Skills.

Organization Design is tough. And gets even more challenging with size. Unfortunately, Org Design over time falls to those folks that rose up the ladder, rather than folks dedicated to understanding and designing orgs.

Switching from a Traditional org to an Agile one doesn't eliminate the need for thoughtful org design, it just changes the structures and incentives, and understanding and leveraging the interplay of various factors still requires unbiased organizational skills.

Mature companies will often send executives through training around organization design, but separating out the incentives that apply personally to the executives, from what they do for the company, can be challenging. So larger companies will tend to have a org design or operating model team, and very large companies will formalize this as CoE or Transformation Offices.

Still, getting that balance right can be tricky. Looks like MS failed badly in this instance. Maybe they learned from it, maybe they didn't. Judging by the way things are going with Win11, and the lack of response from the EVP, CEO and Board levels, maybe they ignored their internal folks that help with alignment, or more likely, simply laid them off!

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

#474

Post by foobiekr »

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…

I work for a 300+B company that spends nearly $1b a year on AWS.

Microsoft engaged in a relentless romance campaign with our loser EVP and one of his reports for months giving him the cool LinkedIn post opportunities that weak executives crave.

Eventually he started pushing engineering to move to Azure.

We have not yet (many bullets dodged so far) but it’s there and a periodic major time sink entirely due to manipulation and flattery.

The entire “multicloud” push was a marketing effort by Microsoft to try and undermine exec faith in their “what? No, that’s a shit ton of work with zero return on investment” engineering teams.

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

#475

Post by jtbayly »

chasd00 wrote: post #46
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…

Yeah I thought that was extreme. An engineer going to the board of any corporation let alone Microsoft is not normal or customary IME. That could explain why they got no response.

When you see significant risks to the org and its value, and they go completely unaddressed by management, the board is the final step before going to the public. It is the board’s duty to the public owners to make sure management isn’t driving the company into the ground.

It would be interesting to see this raised in the next shareholders meeting as a question of whether the board and exec team are actually competent and doing their work.

A man can dream anyway. When there is this much money on the line, sometimes people actually get held somewhat accountable.

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

#476

Post by GandalfHN »

maxwg wrote: post #108
pRusya wrote: post #3

It's a nice read. Thank you for sharing this. > Microsoft, meanwhile, conducted major layoffs—approximately 15,000 roles across waves in May and July 2025 —most likely to compensate for the immediate losses to CoreWeave ahead of the next earnings calls. This is what people should know when seeing massive layoffs due to AI.

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 ownersh…

[flagged]

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

#477

Post by bawolff »

axelriet wrote: post #308
bawolff wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Last thing, the final part 6 comes off as really childish, risks to national security and sending letters to the board, really? That struck me too. Maybe i've never worked high enough in an org (im unclear how highly ranked the author of the piece is) but i've never been in an org where going over your boss's boss's boss's boss's head and writing a letter to the board was likely to go well. That said, i could easil…

I didn’t say it went well. Actually I said it didn’t go well :(

Yes, but you are writing as if you expected it to go well.

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

#478

Post by bostik »

pjmlp wrote: post #425
mike_hearn wrote: post #354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I worked at a startup that was using Azure. The reason was simple enough - it had been founded by finance people who were used to Excel, so Windows+Office was the non-negotiable first bit of IT they purchased. That created a sales channel Microsoft used to offer generous startup credits. The free money created a structural lack of discipline around spending. Once the startup credits ran out, the company became faced…

I have had bad experiences across all major vendors. The main reason I used to push for Azure instead during the last years was the friendliness of their Web UIs, and having the VS Code integration (it started as an Azure product after all).

Friendliness?

VSCode integration out of the box, that I can understand. But I have a really hard time calling Azure UI "friendly". Everything is behind layers of nested pointy-clicky chains with opaque or flat out misleading names.

To make things worse, their APIs also follow the same design. Everything you actually would want to do is behind a long sequence of pointer-chasing across objects and service/resource managers. Almost as if their APIs were built to directly reflect their planned UI action sequences.

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

#479

Post by kristjansson »

steve1977 wrote: post #463
gilrain wrote: post #445

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who’s compared spreadsheet feature sets, though: it’s also very much the feature set.

Well, in a way it is of course, because if your reference is Excel, then you want the feature set of Excel. Or what specifically do you mean?

Sheets and Numbers are spreadsheets. Excel is an application platform and programming language that’s convinced people it’s just a spreadsheet.

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

#480

Post by pjmlp »

rescbr wrote: post #461
pjmlp wrote: post #431

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.…

Oh, as somebody who wrote C++/CX code at the time, I was very pissed when they replaced it with WinRT.

Same here, the way it was removed, without tooling parity on Visual Studio, revealed a complete lack of respect for those of us paying licenses.

This was one of the reasons I eventually moved back into distributed systems, and was pissed enough that I keep dismounting the WinUI marketing.

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