The Windows Shutdown crapfest (2006)

Doesn't the focus on data simply shift the problems you describe to telemetry decisions?

I don't work at Microsoft, but you've eloquently described issues I deal with at my own workplace. I think your outcome 1) is almost inevitable in many large software orgs as ego/reputation fills the decision making vacuum left by the absence of 'good' data/telemetry.

Yes, and, I might be misunderstanding your question, but I view that as a good thing. I don't ever want to spend my time in a meeting witnessing people bicker over where to position a dialog button, when you could just run an A/B test and let data guide the decision process.

This isn't purely a software engineering mess though. The PC architecture for "off" is a mess at the hardware level too.

I mean, long ago you just had a physical switch on the power supply. But then filesystem authors invented buffering and that wasn't safe anymore. So now there were two ways to shut the machine off: the "safe" way and the old way (where the "old" way was still available via e.g. holding the power button down for 4 seconds).

Then, we wanted to start using laptops and carrying them around. But booting the whole computer again and again every time you changed your seat became a chore, so software people invented this cool new trick where you could dump memory to disk and restore it later, so "hibernation" was born and we now had three ways to shut down.

Then the hardware people jumped in and pointed out that really the problem here is just the CPU. DRAM refresh is cheap, so there's really no need to dump the RAM at all. Let's just shut the CPU off and come up with a hardware/firmware/OS/driver hack (yeah, it touches basically everything) for powering on into a known DRAM configuration. Much faster! And now we had a fourth way to shut down.

(OK, this is a little spun. In fact suspend to disk and suspend to RAM landed nearly simultaneously in the PC world, with different manufacturers picking different horses. Then of course ACPI came in and standardized both, forever locking us into not one but two kinds of suspend.)

Then of course, we had a paradigm shift where "mobile" OSes revisted this whole scheme and threw it out the window. The hardware people making mobile chips designed the clock and power gating logic such that the "suspend to RAM" happens essentially every time the CPU reaches an idle state, and never has to be "entered" explicitly the way ACPI S3 is. And now PCs are shipping with this scheme too even on systems where ACPI still works in a traditional way. So, yeah. FIVE.

I mean, Microsoft surely made a UI mess out of this. But it's not like they were handed a simple problem to begin with.

I have decided to stick with writing code rather than progress my career.

Consequently I am that minority in the team delivering features that customers use. I take personal pride in that and keep quiet about it. Those reports, those plans, the documentation, the mock ups, the meetings and the emails are not in the final product, all that work counted for next to nothing. Ultimately it was mostly two of us working away and refining the specs by collaboration with stakeholders on an informal basis. Because we understand the problem space we are able to ask the important questions and I think stakeholders prefer working directly with programmers rather than have messages related via management channels with costs plucked out of the air and relayed back.

With stakeholders I find I am talking their language and a lot of ground gets covered in a working meeting, where some fixes are done during that meeting with anything requiring more time speced out. With management intermediaries they think everyone thinks like how they think so they can't imagine that it would be safe to have the programmer talk in a mix of trade jargon with a client. Usually this is part of the gig, many people make a cushty living coasting between meetings. What do we do so as to get on with the job but not enable this coasting that goes on with freeloading management types?