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

Post by jimbokun » Fri, Apr 03, 2026, 6:17 PM UTC

senderista wrote: post #506

caoilte wrote: post #481

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Post by drob518 » Fri, Apr 03, 2026, 6:25 PM UTC

Post by jimbokun » Fri, Apr 03, 2026, 6:28 PM UTC

varispeed wrote: post #439

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 t…

Post by markus_zhang » Fri, Apr 03, 2026, 6:30 PM UTC

72f988bf wrote: post #533

markus_zhang wrote: post #497

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a human problem. We humans praise the doctors that can put the patients with terminal illnesses alive for extended periods, but ignore those who tell us the principles to prevent getting those illnesses in the first place. We throw flowers and money to doctors who treat cancers, but do we do the same to the ones who tell us principles to avoid cancers? No. The same for MSFT or any other similar problem. Human…

> Humans only care when the house is on fire In corporate context it's because that's, in theory, an effective use of resources: If 20 teams are constantly "there is a huge risk of fire", a lot of mental energy is wasted figuring out how to stack rank those 20 and how real of a fire risk there is. If instead you wait when there is a real fire, you can get the 15 teams actually fixing that one. In practice, you've pro…

Post by pjmlp » Fri, Apr 03, 2026, 6:44 PM UTC

axelriet wrote: post #570

pjmlp wrote: post #418

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That was quite interesting and now I will take another point of view of the stuff I shared previously. However given how Windows team has been anti anything not C++, it is not surprising that it actually happened like that.

It came from the top of Azure and for Azure only. Specifically the mandate was for all new code that cannot use a GC i.e. no more new C or C++ specifically. I think the CTO was very public about that at RustCon and other places where he spoke. The examples he gave were contrived, though, mostly tiny bits of old GDI code rewritten in Rust as success stories to justify his mandate. Not convincing at all. Azure node sof…