Shenanigans on Microsoft Feedback Hub

Sarcasm, as if switching from Microsoft to Nintendo was any better.

Especially when it’s the developer that is inactive. Like, we’ve ignored you for 7 days and now we have committed to ignoring you forever. If I find this I won’t even bother filing a report. I get that we’re not owed attention, but they’re not owed bug reports. As a dev I have won’t fixed issues due to lack of dev time. I think the problem is when it’s paid software, or an open source project connected to paid software. There seems to be a push of testing onto the users which is disastrous when combined with a policy of ignoring them. Microsoft went through a period of aiming for two testers for each dev. Post my tenure it seems that devs are supposed to the test themselves.

Oh hey, it's the event that made me leave reddit:) Yeah, I'm not sure why that didn't prompt a mass exodus. One thing that I've discovered by talking to people in real life is that apparently a lot of people just don't know that it happened.

It's different (IMHO better) on Mac, even though it looks superficially similar.

On Mac, there is conceptually a two-level hierarchy of apps and windows. Every app maintains its own stack of windows. You can switch between apps with a single click (or keyboard command) and then switch between windows in that app's window stack if you want to bring a different one to the top. So a single click och keypress lets you switch between any pair of windows that are topmost in their respective apps. (There is also a keyboard shortcut to switch windows within an app.)

On Windows, you can't switch to apps (only to windows) but the windows are grouped by app into a hierarchical menu, so every time you switch window from the taskbar it takes two clicks and you are forced to hunt through a list of thumbnails.

> Former MSFTy, don’t bother wasting your time giving feedback. Nobody cares, those that cared left.

What you're describing does not comport with my experience there.

Personally, I ensured that every issue filed on GitHub was triaged (read, replied if necessary, de-duped if necessary, labeled appropriately, assigned a severity/priority) and that all feedback items from the Visual Studio feedback system that applied to my product area was either (a) de-duped to GitHub and given the same treatment, or (b) dealt with in that system because it might have had some info that could constitute private data being leaked (sometimes I'd create a representative issue on GitHub and de-dupe to that one if appropriate).

What I'm describing is actually routine for most PMs and engineers in the group I was in, and that's still the case today. I won't claim that it's perfect or that everyone who files an issue will have their bugs dealt with immediately, but I've had several community members give positive feedback about the whole thing and talk about how it's like night and day compared to previous eras at the company.

> Even for software where ‘zero bugs’ was important they’d just delete a whole bunch of bugs and see if any bounce (come back). Eventually people get sick of refilling so they get to zero but bounce by exhausting the very people eying time help them.

This is ridiculous and I sincerely hope it's not happening outside of small groups (who should stop right now). I never saw this happen. We'd deprecate some older things and then close associated bugs as not applicable, but declaring bankruptcy on a bunch of legit bugs would be unheard of in the group I worked with. If you were caught doing that you'd be in some deep shit, since it's a violation of the trust your community places in you to be a responsible caretaker of the software they rely on.

> Enough social media pressure may end up risking a line item in a PMs yearly goals.

Social media pressure is a thing, sadly, but also not that much of a thing. Only in rare cases did something exploding on twitter or whatever cause action on our end. I'm also curious where in Microsoft a single PM's line items are treated with that much relative importance. This whole notion of "PMs dictate and devs make it happen" is bizarre to me because figuring out what to do next was always a collaboration and careful evaluation of tradeoffs across both disciplines. Again, it wasn't perfect and there's much I wish was different, but fundamentally it was sound and constructive. Any of my line items as a PM wouldn't somehow get re-prioritized just because someone yelled about it on social media.

Anyways, I'm sorry you had a bad time with what seems like it may have been a bad group. If what you're saying is true, I hope that changes for the group you were with.