>>9760>Tell us a story.This is somewhat confidential shit, so I hope I don't doxx myself.
According to the cloud teams at Microsoft, a Russian spy was working in that team. A bunch of alphabet soup got involved to deal with the spy. Needless to say he was given the full treatment by the law and obviously fired. Pretty sure he had family and had worked at Microsoft for some time.
This was also during peak Russiagate. I was very surprised it didn't leak and cause a fucking media meltdown.
>Can you say whether you believe this comment from 2016 is/was applicable?Sure.
>MS has some very talented programmers.True. Top notch programmers.
>They're not very common, but they exist.Meh, I'd say at least 50% of the devs I met were good devs. Genius programmers aren't as useful or productive as one would think.
>The problem is that the entire company is completely and totally focused on developing an absurd number of new features and products [and the rest of the rant..]I'd say this is somewhat true but doesn't really get at the heart of the problem. The big issue at Microsoft is that it's an old bureaucratic company. Ever since Satya Nadela took over, they've been trying to modernize the company, to big success IMO, at least internally. But this means that managers are now prioritizing "hip" shit over fixing decades of tech debt.
Many people are constantly trying to justify their work at all levels of management, because many times they are building some stupid unnecessary product that some business asshole decided the company needed. It's the classic disconnect between business wants, managers disconnect to the product they are building, and the devs. The result is this push to launch new products and new ideas that are all half baked and eventually get sacked because they have no real business value. Huge teams get dissolved all the time because they've been building some shiny feature that business managers wanted. There's just so much chaos in the development of anything and so much disconnect to real business needs, it's a fucking mess. A good example is the absolute failure of the edge browser, and its chakra engine. The amount of bugs it had was absolutely insane and the dedicated bug-fixing edge team couldn't keep up. The project costed probably billions of dollars and they sacked it all to replace it with wrapped chromium. There is active incentive to not step back and re-think shit, because it might cost you your job. Business managers tell the managers that they want the edge browser because their excel sheet and marketers told them to do it, and managers tell their sub managers to keep chugging against all odds.
Then there's the huge legacy of everything. Whatever internal library you're working with is very likely very complex and cumbersome because it has to deal with legacy bullshit or it is the legacy bullshit itself. Also, most services have to run on windows servers. You can imagine how fun that must be.
Basically there is large incentive for upper management to "innovate" (tell their department to build the products they want), but that usually fails fantastically. And there is large incentive to not stop doing actively stupid shit.
And it goes without saying that devs have no say in how things are run outside their immediate team.
tl;dr office space except "hip"
>>9787>when did you work there?A few years back. Around the years 2014-2018 ;) trying to not be super specific.