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

isolveproblems.substack.com

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

#501

Post by staticassertion »

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…

It is so hard to test those codebases too. A lot of the time there's IO and implicit state changes through the code. Even getting testing in place, let alone good testing, is often an incredibly difficult task. And no one will refactor the code to make testing easier because they're too afraid to break the code.

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

#502

Post by tw04 »

doctorpangloss wrote: post #247
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…

if the service is so shitty, why are people paying so much fucking money for it? is microsoft committing an accounting fraud?

You’re assuming the alternatives don’t have just as many issues. There’s been exactly one “whistleblower” who is probably tiptoeing the line of a lawsuit. I wouldn’t assume just because there isn’t a similar disgruntled gcp or aws engineer doesn't mean they don't have similar ways.

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

#503

Post by markus_zhang »

bayindirh wrote: post #420
pjmlp wrote: post #416

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Visual Studio has had quite some tooling similar to it, and you can have static analysis turned on all the time. SAL also originated with XP SP2 issues. Just like there have been toons of tools trying to fix C's flaws. However the big issue with opt-in tooling is exactly it being optional, and apparently Microsoft doesn't enforce it internally as much as we thought .

> However the big issue with opt-in tooling is exactly it being optional, That's true, and that's a problem. > and apparently Microsoft doesn't enforce it internally as much as we thought . but this, in my eyes, is a much bigger problem. It's baffling considering what Microsoft does as their core business. Operating systems high impact software. > Visual Studio has had quite some tooling similar to it, and you can ha…

I think the core business of MSFT has always been — building a platform, grab everyone in and seek rent. Bill figured out from 1975 so it has been super successful.

OS was that platform but in Azure it is just the lowest layer, so maybe management just doesn’t see it, as long as the platform works and government contracts keep coming in. Then you have a bunch of yes-man engineers (I’m so surprised that any principle engineer, who should be financially free, could push out plans described by the author in this series) who gives the management false hopes.

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

#504

Post by pavlov »

ozim wrote: post #264
locusofself wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not what the "problem" was. It's that cheap American support people were "escorting" foreign Microsoft SWEs, so they could manage and fix services they wrote and were the subject matter experts for in the sovereign cloud instances which they otherwise would have no access to. And this was NOT for the government clouds we have that hold classified data. Those are air-gapped clouds that physically cannot be acce…

I would definitely fight against calling anything I work on „digital escort”.

When the blog post mentioned Hegseth and “digital escort” in the same sentence, I was surprised to learn it wasn’t about his OnlyFans habit at his work desktop.

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

#505

Post by gigel82 »

I have no doubt Azure sucks, but almost all huge projects like that have systemic issues.

Axel sounds like a pretty smart guy, but wanted to point out I've seen this kind of behavior before, often from mid-level "job-hopping" engineers (sometimes with overly inflated egos) that overconfidently declare everything the organization is doing is BS and they have the magic solution to it.

And yes, sometimes by sending long winded emails to very large internal groups about how their solution will address all the problems if only someone recognize their genius (and eventually give them a VP title and budget). Some of the time, they are well intended but missing crucial historical knowledge about why things are in the state they are and why what they're proposing was tried 5 times before and failed.

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

#506

Post by senderista »

caoilte wrote: post #481
bob1029 wrote: post #385

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 incen…

Unit tests are just as important as integration tests as long as they're tightly scoped to business logic and aren't written just to improve coverage. Anything can be done badly, especially if it is quantified and used as a metric of success (Goodhart's law applies). Integration tests can be just as bad in this regard. They can be flakey and take hours, give you a false sense of security and not even address the comp…

“Premature abstraction” forced by unit tests can make systems harder to maintain.

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

#507

Post by gigel82 »

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..

A "Senior Software Engineer" at Microsoft is someone with a pulse and 3 years of experience (due to title inflation); so despite the "senior" in the title definitely not "senior engineering staff".

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

#508

Post by kjs3 »

user34283 wrote: post #244
everdrive wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I imagine that no one likes Azure.

We use Azure for desktops and we pay $600/month for 4 cores, getting performance comparable to a $60 Intel N100 chip.

We tried this (and M$ sold it hard) and never went to production with it (except for a couple of niche use cases). It was obviously not going to meet expectations before we were half way through the PoC.

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

#509

Post by jubilanti »

mpyne wrote: post #144
CoastalCoder wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd like to suggest calling him SECDEF, not SECWAR. IMHO the country should not capitulate to Trump's power grabs, even if Congress refuses to perform their oversight duties.

I'm sympathetic to the viewpoint but I'm not in the habit of policing the names people use for themselves. I've certainly done more than my fair share of jobs in the Navy where the office I was formally billeted to had long since ceased to actually exist as described due to office renamings. Often things as simple as a department section being elevated into a department branch and people using the new name even while…

> the American voters made their choice about who they want to run these agencies

The American voters don't get to override the U.S. constitution. The American voters also voted in the U.S. Congress, which has the sole authority to name the department and title. My representatives have not voted to change the law. Do you not care about the rule of law?

> I'm not in the habit of policing the names people use for themselves.

I'm sure you think you're being clever, but this is such a bad faith argument.

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