Decisions that eroded trust in Azure – by a former Azure Core engineer • Hacker News Board

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

#671

Post by axelriet » Sun, Apr 05, 2026, 12:35 AM UTC

chasd00 wrote: post #46

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…

Yeah I thought that was extreme. An engineer going to the board of any corporation let alone Microsoft is not normal or customary IME. That could explain why they got no response.

“customary” referred to the path through the Secretary, as opposed to writing directly to members. Besides that, depending on the nature of the communication, if everything fails, you may need to be sure you talk to people who will unconditionally put the best interests of the company ahead of any other consideration. The Board is one such group. See what Boeing did with the report of the mechanic who saw flaws in the 737 MAX’s door plugs. Was that worthy of a letter to the CEO, then the Board if no reaction? Or just talk to your dismissive manager and let the planes crash? I made a judgment call, which I entirely own.

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

#672

Post by com2kid » Sun, Apr 05, 2026, 12:36 AM UTC

markus_zhang wrote: post #660

com2kid wrote: post #632

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 ge…

Every large company is doing layoffs right now. Getting an interview 10 years was your best bet. Heck even in 2022 I heard they were brining everyone in for interviews.

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

#673

Post by llama052 » Sun, Apr 05, 2026, 1:31 AM UTC

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?

Yeah it’s entirely business people and executives who make these decisions in most companies. Not the ones who use it or implement on it.

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

#674

Post by Spooky23 » Sun, Apr 05, 2026, 1:59 AM UTC

staticassertion wrote: post #662

Spooky23 wrote: post #655

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I have no idea what you're talking about. This has nothing to do with having "better fedramp certs". If you are setting up fedramp or cmmc you will be heavily, heavily pressured and incentivized to do so with Microsoft tooling. "Better" isn't relevant, which is my entire point. The reason people choose Microsoft isn't "it's better for this", it's because every consultancy out there, every government agency or affilia…

I’ve been in the space for 30 years. Nobody is pressuring anyone to buy Microsoft because of FedRAMP, and Microsoft is not even close to having any advantage with respect to FedRAMP vs their competitors.

FedRAMP is demonstration that the solution met some assessment of controls in alignment with NIST 800-53. As a checkbox, it’s almost as dumb as FIPS 140, and like FIPS, you need to asses risk for your implementation regardless of these things.

Microsoft wins deals because their product catalog is well engineered to incentivize bundled subscriptions that drive marginal adoption. The user facing products are better, Entra is generally right there, and that’s a pivot into many other scenarios that drive spend.

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

#675

Post by replyifuagree » Sun, Apr 05, 2026, 3:52 AM 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…

>If instead you wait when there is a real fire, you can get the 15 teams actually fixing that one.

In this case, with Microsoft's really amazing revenue stream, a charismatic management team can distort reality for quite some time and convince the right people within the company that there is no fire.

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

#676

Post by dbdr » Sun, Apr 05, 2026, 6:54 AM UTC

CoolGuySteve wrote: post #453

dbdr wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I submitted several bug fixes and refactoring, notably using smart pointers, but they were rejected for fear of breaking something. And that, my friends, is why you want a memory safe language with as many static guarantees as possible checked automatically by the compiler.

I had a memory management problem so I introduced GC/ref counting and now I have a non-deterministic memory management problem.

Ref counting is deterministic. Rust memory management is also deterministic: the memory is freed exactly when the owner of the data gets out of scope (and the borrow checker guarantees at compile time there is no use after that).

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

#677

Post by axelriet » Sun, Apr 05, 2026, 7:10 AM UTC

functional_dev wrote: post #516

doctorpangloss wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

this made me look into how cloud hypervisors actually work on HW level.. they all offload it to custom HW (smart nic, fpga, dpu, etc..). cpu does almost nothing except for tenant work. AWS -> Nitro, Azure -> FPGA, NVIDIA sells DPUs. Here is interactive visual guide if anyone wants to explore - https://vectree.io/c/cloud-virtualization-hardware-nitro-cat...

VM management does not run on the FPGA; it’s regular Win32 software on Windows, with aspirations to run some equivalent, someday, on the SoC next to the FPGA on the NIC. The programmable hardware is used for network paths and PCIe functions, where it can project NICs and NVMe devices to VMs to bypass software-based, VMBus-backed virtual devices, all of which end up being serviced on the host who controls the real hardware. Lookup SR-IOV for the bypass. So yes, that’s I/O bypass/offload, but the VM management stack offload is a distinct thing that does not require an FPGA, just a SoC.

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

#678

Post by axelriet » Sun, Apr 05, 2026, 7:22 AM UTC

ninjagoo wrote: post #596

axelriet wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We like things well done, but also integrity and accountability.

>> He is, I think, Swiss, perhaps a cultural difference? > We like things well done, but also integrity and accountability. Unless they involve secret bank accounts [1], refugees [2], and/or nazis [3] :-) All props to you, though, for speaking out. This is going to help a lot of folks understand why things are going the way they are with Azure, and MS. [1] https://www.theguardian.com/news/2022/feb/22/how-swiss-banki.…

Everyone is entitled to their opinion.

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

#679

Post by baridbelmedar » Sun, Apr 05, 2026, 10:37 AM UTC

_dain_ wrote: post #552

steve1977 wrote: post #463

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, in a way it is of course, because if your reference is Excel, then you want the feature set of Excel. Or what specifically do you mean?

VBA, PowerQuery, structured references, the newer formulae like XLOOKUP, dynamic array-spill formulae, map/filter/reduce/lambda, various obscure financial stuff. Sheets and Calc don't have these.

The problem is that it encourages people to use excel for things that should never be in a spreadsheet in the first place. I mean if you're reaching for VBA, building complex PowerQuery pipelines, and writing nested LAMBDA functions just to process your data, imho you have outgrown excel. Just because you can build an entire solution in Excel because you already know the interface, doesn't mean you should...

Also, don't get me started on the newer functions such as XLOOKUP and Dynamic... Relational data belongs in a relational database. If you are joining tables and filtering massive arrays, you should be using standard SQL Arrays, it makes it so much easier to troubleshoot long term.

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

#680

Post by CoolGuySteve » Sun, Apr 05, 2026, 2:19 PM UTC

dbdr wrote: post #676

CoolGuySteve wrote: post #453

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had a memory management problem so I introduced GC/ref counting and now I have a non-deterministic memory management problem.

Ref counting is deterministic. Rust memory management is also deterministic: the memory is freed exactly when the owner of the data gets out of scope (and the borrow checker guarantees at compile time there is no use after that).

Cool now use the reference on another thread.