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Jeffrey Snower was originally demoted over PowerShell
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Re: Jeffrey Snower was originally demoted over PowerShell
#82I've often wondered why powershell hasnt taken off on linux/mac. I'd guess MS would have a good case for investing there (given, eg., linux usage on azure). Particularly in the recent history of "every day, another shell" on linux/mac. Powershell seems to solve the problem being resolved in rust,go,scala,... over-and-over. Why not just use that?
Look, I’ve written a lot of powershell, and I don’t mind it at all, but its not surprising at all to me. Powershell isn’t in the same problem domain as rust/go/Scala/python. The niche it fills is “calling windows apis from c++” or, more recently, c#. It’s less effort than that, so it’s useful, on windows. It is not less effort than using say, a bash script on other platforms because it: - does not provide unique acce…
Also if you look at interactive shells, which have the lower bar to people trying them out (as seen by fish, nushell, etc. picking up users in recent years), powershell is actually quite clunky as an interactive shell. It doesn't appear to have completions matching those shells, the command names are quite tedious for those that don't have built in unix-y aliases, it doesn't provide a facility for common shell shortcuts like "run this one command with a modified environment", etc.
Re: Jeffrey Snower was originally demoted over PowerShell
#83I've often wondered why powershell hasnt taken off on linux/mac. I'd guess MS would have a good case for investing there (given, eg., linux usage on azure). Particularly in the recent history of "every day, another shell" on linux/mac. Powershell seems to solve the problem being resolved in rust,go,scala,... over-and-over. Why not just use that?
Would want to look at how people use Power Shell on Windows and compare to how people use bash/tools/procfs/Python/C on *nix. I think that, on *nix, Power Shell loses to cli tools/bash/procfs for trivial problems, to Python for simple problems, and to native strongly typed languages for complicated problems. Many Windows APIs are COM based, for both arguments and results, so an OO-based scripting language is helpful.…
Debian moved to dash as the default shell a few years ago, nushell gets some users, fish has moved from niche to one of the big players, and yes, some people also use powershell on Linux.
You could argue it's just a changing of the guard as things like csh or ksh die off on Linux and get fish/pwsh take their place as the second tier shells in popularity, but it did feel like many years we were in a bash monoculture with zsh only surviving by being sufficiently compatible.
Re: Jeffrey Snower was originally demoted over PowerShell
#84I have worked at Microsoft off and on for more than 20 years and it is insane how many disaster stories boil down to super horrible Windows management.
“.NET cross platform?” -> Windows screwed it up
“Phones” -> Windows screwed it up
“Azure Linux VM” -> Windows screwed it up (but thankful we fired them and fixed it)
One of best things Satya has done is essentially fire almost all of these morons.
Re: Jeffrey Snower was originally demoted over PowerShell
#85I've often wondered why powershell hasnt taken off on linux/mac. I'd guess MS would have a good case for investing there (given, eg., linux usage on azure). Particularly in the recent history of "every day, another shell" on linux/mac. Powershell seems to solve the problem being resolved in rust,go,scala,... over-and-over. Why not just use that?
Look, I’ve written a lot of powershell, and I don’t mind it at all, but its not surprising at all to me. Powershell isn’t in the same problem domain as rust/go/Scala/python. The niche it fills is “calling windows apis from c++” or, more recently, c#. It’s less effort than that, so it’s useful, on windows. It is not less effort than using say, a bash script on other platforms because it: - does not provide unique acce…
Powershell is a shell. Shells don’t do package management. Do you mean sth like ZSH plugin installers?
Re: Jeffrey Snower was originally demoted over PowerShell
#86I wonder if this was some kind of corporate camouflage. EVERYONE LOOK, WE ARE DEMOTING JEFFREY, cool stuff you're doing, keep doing it.
Re: Jeffrey Snower was originally demoted over PowerShell
#87I find this twitter thread frustrating. Q: What was the justification for the demotion? What became of the leaders that made that decision? A: It was stranger than you can possibly imagine I think the gist of the story is that he was assigned to work on X but worked on Y instead. Notwithstanding how great Y idea turned out to be it seems he was demoted for insubordination?
Twitter threads are frustrating no matter the content, after two replies I get a banner that blocks me from reading until I register. Not gonna happen.
Firefox in a private browser window seems to get past the registration popup for me. You have to close and reload the private window periodically because it somehow starts to fingerprint you as a user and starts showing the popup after some time.
If there's a way to configure a specific site to never ever store any cookies or send them under any circumstance that might be the next thing to try. Make twitter think you're friggin curl. Unbelievable we have to do this nonsense just to read the site.
Re: Jeffrey Snower was originally demoted over PowerShell
#88This is an intriguing peek into some upper echelon MS politics. He notes he got busted down from L69 to L68 - L68 is a significant cutoff inside MS, titled “Partner”. L70 is “Distinguished Engineer”. For recent years, L68 all-in comp is probably right around $1mm a year, although I’m sure that was a bit lower when PowerShell was being written, and much higher in toto if you held on to your RSUs.
What surprises me is everything not said here - I know a number of MS Partner-level folks, and they all strike me as perfectly capable of funding and hiding a reasonable-sized team to work on anything they think is important; in fact reducing and removing precisely this practice is one of the reforms Satya has made — getting upper echelon fiefdoms more aligned.
So, I think the full story is actually a lot more interesting than the tweets. I’d personally like a short memoir instead of the tweets. In any event, don’t feel too bad for him - he did fine, and PowerShell is one of the features that let Windows stay competitive with Linux as the world transitioned to the cloud.
Re: Jeffrey Snower was originally demoted over PowerShell
#89In the cosmic sense, the demotion was lenient, considering that he breathed new life into something which is mostly an abomination, & should have been put out of our collective misery long ago. The cybersecurity industry would be a shadow of its current self if it weren't for good old Windows.
The ACM needs an "H.P. Lovecraft Award" for such situations.
Jeffrey Snower: RE-ANIMATOR
Re: Jeffrey Snower was originally demoted over PowerShell
#90I find this twitter thread frustrating. Q: What was the justification for the demotion? What became of the leaders that made that decision? A: It was stranger than you can possibly imagine I think the gist of the story is that he was assigned to work on X but worked on Y instead. Notwithstanding how great Y idea turned out to be it seems he was demoted for insubordination?
IIRC powershell came about in the mid 2000s when it was the peak Steve Balmer and Windows Vista era for Microsoft. Absolutely none of the senior leaders at that time survived at the company in the long run, at least no one in the Windows organization. Jim Allchin, Steve Sinofsky, etc.