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

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611–620 of 697 posts

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

#611

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like emailing the CEO in this case is just a no-op, the inbox is gatekeeped by his staff and very unlikely he saw your email. That said, “inbox always open” means you should come with a problem AND a very well detailed solution. But question becomes if you had a detailed solution that was good, why wasn’t it ran up the org chart with buy in and why did it have to skip to the top.

The answer is “intricate politics and misplaced personal interests.”

But that's part of a great solution... it sounds like you might have had a good technical solution, but that's only half the solution in enterprise. If your technical solution requires another team to completely retool, its not a great solution overall.

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

#612

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think it contradicts the OP. OP says the system is unreliable. Memory leaks that lead to out of memory failures for example. Smart pointers would stabilize things. (Also note that OP says their smart pointers PR was rejected).

That's a generalized statement. Smart pointers can stabilize things, if used wrongly they can cause just as many issues. Sprinkling in smart pointers such that there is now mixed use with smart and raw pointers can cause double frees, and huge maintenance issues. So, creating a single PR to introduce smart pointers in my opinion is not necessarily "stability". He should have created an architecture plan and got upstr…

Completely agree on alignment. Without it, it's a shortcut to rejection. I actually wrote a lot about this in a blog post I called "Minimum Reviewable Unit" https://gieseanw.wordpress.com/2025/03/21/minimum-reviewable...

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

#613
post #604
post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Meaning Msft Principal is below L5? I got the same feedback from one of my friends who works at Google. She said quality of former MSFT engineers now working at Google was noticeably lower.

I mean imputed prestige within the organization. Being an L5 is nothing; it's the promote-or-fire cutoff at Google AFAIK. But being a Principal is slightly more than nothing; it's two levels above the promote-or-fire cutoff. I mean, _now_, sure, I'd assume Microsoft Principals should be hired around L4 at Google. But that's just due to a temporary inbalance in the decline of legacy organizations. Give it a few years…

L5 hasn't been the promote or fire cutoff at Google for perhaps a decade. L4 is the new L5, mostly because Google would have to pay L5s more, and it has been terrified of personnel costs for years.

But even so, an L5 at Google is basically a nobody as far as prestige or convincing other people to adopt your plan goes. Even L6 is basically just an expert across several mostly local teams. L7 is where the prestige gets going.

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

#614
post #267

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..

putting aside that MS is too huge to even just know about the names of your senior engineers across the globe and that the mail might have gone directly to spam

there is still the issue that this might have been classified as "a crazy letter"

a lot of the article reminds me of people which might (or might not) have competency but insists they know better and are very stubborn and very bad and compromising on solutions. The subtext of the articles is not that far afar from "everyone does everything wrong, I know better, but no one listens to me". If you frame it like that it very much sounds like a "crazy" letter.

Strictly speaking it reminds me a lot about how Pirate Software spoke about various EA related topics. (Context: Pirate Software was a streamer and confidence man who got complemented up due to family connections and "confidently knew" everything better while having little skill or contributions and didn't know when to stop having a "confidently bad" opinion. Kinda sad ending given that he did motivate people to peruse their dream in game design and engage themself for animal protection.).

Or how I did do so in the past. Appearing very confident in your know-how ironically isn't always good.

And in case it's not clear: The writing reminding me of it and having patters of someone trying to create a maximally believable writing to make MS look bad doesn't mean that he behaves like that or that the writing is intended to be seen that way.

It's more about how we have a lot of "information" which all look very believable, but in the end miss means to both: Verify many of the named "facts". And, more importantly, judge the sentiment/implicit conveyed information.

Especially if we just take the mentioned "facts" without the implicit messages and ignore the himmanagement communication issues I would guess a lot of that is true.

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

#615

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless you’re still senior after 10+ years. Add to that switching companies and coming back same level…

Life works in mysterious ways. Whoever you are, bring it on and prove any of my points wrong.

Like the one where 1.5T in value went pfoof due to reasons you mentioned? I will let people judge whether your arguments are most likely, or whether this is bubble syndrome. Hint: there is a large distance between use of smart pointers and market effects.

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

#616
post #5

> The direct corollary is that any successful compromise of the host can give an attacker access to the complete memory of every VM running on that node. Keeping the host secure is therefore critical. > In that context, hosting a web service that is directly reachable from any guest VM and running it on the secure host side created a significantly larger attack surface than I expected. That is quite scary

Instead of zero trust, it is 110% trust.

Well I have zero trust in Microsoft, so they've achieved that at least.

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

#617

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Search VMS stability, I think the consensus is clear. Then Google VMS longest uptime, and the record is 28 years. VMS often achieved five nines over 10 years (99.999%) so no irony. He took a bunch of folks with him from DEC to Microsoft to make NT, and of course his principles. Nowadays NT is bomb-proof believe it or not. Most of the crashes are in device drivers and some rare times in the UI code (Win32k) that shoul…

I remember reading "Showstoppers" and David was quoted to say "If you break the build I'm the lawn mower and your ass is grass". Do you think such attitude is mandatory for good kernel level code? (I actually think it does and argued with people on HN, although I never wrote any professional kernel code myself)

Aside: If you liked "Showstopper" you should give a listen to the Computer History Museum's oral history interview with David Cutler: https://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/10271716...

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

#618

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…

I notice the title mentions the author is a former employee but he never mentions the terms on which he left.

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

#619

A business man at a prior employer sympathetic with my younger, naive "Microsoft sucks" attitude told me something I remember to this day: Microsoft is not a software company, they have never been experts at software. They are experts at contracts. They lead because their business machine exceeds at understanding how to tick the boxes necessary to win contract bids. The people who make purchasing decisions at compani…

This is in many ways a smart way to understand the problem, but it doesn't mean that microsoft contracts mean you're stuck with bad software. There are several verticals where Microsoft and Azure actually were smart and chose a better software product to sell on their platform than what they had in house. One example is when they stopped trying to develop a inferior product to EMR and Dataproc, and essentially just o…

The Databricks thing was a ploy. They then pushed Azure Synapse Analytics and forced all internal teams to stop using Azure Databricks. Synapse was half baked and then they are now pushing Microsoft Fabric which is even less baked.

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

#620

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember reading "Showstoppers" and David was quoted to say "If you break the build I'm the lawn mower and your ass is grass". Do you think such attitude is mandatory for good kernel level code? (I actually think it does and argued with people on HN, although I never wrote any professional kernel code myself)

Aside: If you liked "Showstopper" you should give a listen to the Computer History Museum's oral history interview with David Cutler: https://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/10271716...

Thanks, I have done that one, and the other from Dave’s garage.
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