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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

#651

Post by dartharva »

bigbuppo wrote: post #13
vintagedave wrote: post #9

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…

The CEO is accountable to the board. If they are derelict in their obligations to the company, that's where you need to raise a stink so they can fix it.

Yeah but I can't conceive a world where a Board would care about technical complaints from an employee about engineering decisions several levels downstream of the CEO's executive domain.

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

#652

Post by egorfine »

jasomill wrote: post #639
egorfine wrote: post #346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am sensing a "is-odd" and "is-even" vibes from that approach.

Not at all. Most programs only use one or a few hash functions, so grouping each family into a separate crate reduces compliation time for the majority of users. Could also help when auditing the removal of vulnerable hash functions. As for ripgrep, the organization is quite sensible: 1. one crate to define an interface for regex matchers 2. one crate to implement the native matcher 3. one crate to implement the PCRE…

Yes I perfectly understand the reasoning and technically it is sound.

It becomes insane once you start thinking of real life implications, specifically supply chain attacks.

Although it's only marginally more insane than the other ecosystems.

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

#653

Post by dartharva »

Anon1096 wrote: post #24

The post is so dramatized and clearly written by someone with a grudge such that it really detracts from any point that is trying to be made, if there is any. From another former Az eng now elsewhere still working on big systems, the post gets way way more boring when you realize that things like "Principle Group Manager" is just an M2 and Principal in general is L6 (maybe even L5) Google equivalent. Similarly Sev2 i…

Do you contest the fact that Microsoft royally fumbled OpenAI out of sheer incapability of providing what's supposed to be its core business despite having all deals in its favor? Because that's the most damning validation against Azure in recent times.

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

#654

Post by dartharva »

ludwigvan wrote: post #21

I had the misfortune of having to use Azure back in 2018 and was appalled at the lack of quality, slowness. I was in GitHub forums, helping other customers suffering from lack of basic functionality, incredible prices with abysmal performance. This article explains a lot honestly. Google’s Cloud feels like the best engineered one, though lack of proper human support is worrying there compared to AWS.

> Google’s Cloud feels like the best engineered one, though lack of proper human support is worrying there compared to AWS.

Also the lack of locations in general. GCP's fleet is tiny compared to both AWS and Azure

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

#655

Post by Spooky23 »

staticassertion wrote: post #334
Spooky23 wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FedRAMP means nothing. It’s a checkbox. National security stuff has a different standard.

It "means nothing" that the way that government systems get set up for government data is all using Microsoft tooling?

The tail wags the dog. GCP and Workspace have had better FedRAMP certs for ages.

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

#656

Post by RyujiYasukochi »

axelriet wrote: post #312
dbdr wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If 90% of the code I run is in safe rust (including the part that's new and written by me, therefore most likely to introduce bugs) and 10% is in C or unsafe rust, are you saying that has no value? Il meglio è l'inimico del bene. Le mieux est l'ennemi du bien. Perfect is the enemy of good.

That is an unexpected interpretation. Use the best tool for the job, also factoring what you (and your org) are comfortable with.

[flagged]

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

#657

Post by sevenseacat »

Hammershaft wrote: post #618
vintagedave wrote: post #9

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.

at the bottom of part 4 -

> The org’s leadership responded with strong defensiveness and denial. Not long afterward, the organization terminated my employment.

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

#658

Post by estimator7292 »

markus_zhang wrote: post #497
InsideOutSanta wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the root of the issue. For something like Azure, people are nor fungible. You need to retain them for decades, and carefully grow the team, training new members over a long period until they can take on serious responsibilities. But employees are rewarded for showing quick wins and changing jobs rapidly, and employers are rewarded for getting rid of high earners (i.e. senior, long-term employees).

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…

This is a capitalism problem.

If you treat people well and give them the means to survive without trying to wring every red cent you can out of them, they'll be more likely to stick around and keep providing value.

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

#659

Post by steveBK123 »

asdfman123 wrote: post #540
steveBK123 wrote: post #532

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You don't get rewarded for cleaning up mess (despite lip service from management) nor for maintaining the product after the launch I have never worked at a shop or on a codebase where "move fast & break things, then fix it later" ever got to the "fix it later" party. I've worked at large orgs with large old codebases where the % of effort needed for BAU / KTLO slowly climbs to 100%. Usually some combination of tech…

People are still trying to figure out how to use AI. Right now the meme is it's used by juniors to churn out slop, but I think people will start to recognize it's far more powerful in the hands of competent senior devs. It actually surprised me that you can use AI to write even better code: tell it to write a test to catch the suspected bug, then tell it to fix the bug, then have it write documentation. Maybe also sp…

Having worked on many long-lived projects for 5+ years at big firms, I think theres an aspect of project management being a dark art which will conflict with the hopes & dreams of AI.

Developer productivity is notoriously difficult to measure. Even feature velocity, cadence or volume improvements are rarely noticed & acknowledged by users for long. They will always complain about speed and somehow notice slowdowns (and invent them in their head as well).

I once joined a team that was in crises, they couldn’t ship for 6 months due to outages. We stabilized production, put in tests, introduced better SDLC, and started shipping every 1-2 weeks. I swear to you that it was not more than a few months before stakeholders were whinging about velocity again. You JUST had zero, give me a break.

If you get a 3x one-off boost by adopting AI and then that’s the new normal, you’ll be shocked how little they pat you on the back for it. Particularly if some of that 3x is spent on tickets to “make the code easier for AI to understand”, testing, and low priority tickets in the backlog no one had bothered doing previously (seen a lot of these anecdotes). And god help you if your velocity slips after that 3x boost, they will notice the hell out of that.

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

#660

Post by markus_zhang »

com2kid wrote: post #632
markus_zhang wrote: post #520

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“One team we literally had to draw straws once to determine who was going to learn how to write native code for Windows.” Jesus, you have tons of people who are willing to do that, even now. Microsoft just don’t care to hire from non-target schools, or ordinary professionals and train them —- sure the reason is, people believe that you cannot improve mediocrity, which I don’t believe so. On a completely different pag…

> Jesus, you have tons of people who are willing to do that, even now. Microsoft just don’t care to hire from non-target schools, or ordinary professionals and train them Microsoft was never elitist about what schools they hired from. When I was there almost anyone who applied from an accredited CS program got at least a phone screen. But no one in their right mind, in 2012 (when this particular incident happened!),…

I don’t know, I’d love to do the job. Where do I sign up? I know some C from my OS projects, a bit of C++ with my SDL game projects, nothing professional. I also write a lot of Python and SQL. I’m in Canada. Don’t care about salary as long as it’s kinda stable and above 90k CAD, that’s about 1/3 salary cut. QT is good too, I did one project.

I actually tried my luck on LinkedIn but without answer, so would love to get a reference somewhere. If people say my side projects are not enough, which is probably true, I can focus on some Win32 programming for 3 months and see if it works.

But if they only hire greybeards who bagged 20 years of experience then I’m out of luck.

Of course the ideal job is some system programmers job, but I understand that’s too hard, so a notch above is the next good option.

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