Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit
Maybe acting like jerk-offs got them to four trillion but there are consequences to burning all your social capital. A large camp of software developers have genuinely hostile feelings towards Microsoft, I would bet that this affects the quality of talent they can hire and these are downstream affects.

Lately it seems like more non-techies are souring on the company.

>A large camp of software developers have genuinely hostile feelings towards Microsoft

which, besides hatred, manifests in malice, like Nightmare Eclipse. I wouldn't be surprised if this outage was an engineer leaving a parting gift, using a bug they probably knew of for years but management didn't allow them to fix.

Agree. I was having suspicions around that
{"deleted":true,"id":50480673,"parent":50480582,"time":1794562101,"type":"comment"}
talent they can hire? large swaths of the company have been in a hiring freeze. they just sent 25% of the company voluntary severance offers.
they've still been hiring, just on an attritional basis - headcount has remained flat for a few yrs now. it is pretty clear though that they want to operate even leaner.
Tellingly, I will not go to MS for UI stuff. When I have to anyway, I use their decades-old APIs. It is a canary with regards to microsoft, that they have no known champion for their UI stuff, no trusted face for their UI stuff; the company all just appears to coast along on "I assume someone is handling it?" The main microsoft employee I trust is Raymond Chen, they have no current generations of Raymond Chen / that we know of.
I've been hearing that since 2002, at least.

Enterprises have been failed time and time again by poor MS products, but techies will steadfastly refuse to move off it, so the business has no option.

> Enterprises have been failed time and time again by poor MS products, but techies will steadfastly refuse to move off it, so the business has no option.

My suspicion is that lots of the companies are so attached to all the MS stuff (and that's what their staff know), that it would be an incredibly large lift for them to move off it.

Like, I'm at a very windows/azure focused shop now (for the first time in my career), and literally everything is already on MS, or moving towards MS.

There are some good reasons for that, and some bad reasons, but I suspect that most of the sales process happens at the executive level, rather than the technical level (and Excel runs the world, so why not let MS do everything else?).

Jerk-offs can skim the profit of going big yesterday while the consequences affect everyone, but only in the future of yesterday. Who does such things, one might ask? Jerk-offs, off course. And PE too (likely not a disjoint set).
Was there ever a time when this was not true? M$ was always among top hated companies since 90s, arrogance, fuck-U to users all around, absolutely ignoring any standards larger than them, and famous 'Embrace, extend, and extinguish' which was pathetic to watch for any engineer worth 2 cents.

Top notch user experience peak was Windows XP and every subsequent release was massively larger, clunkier and slower while requiring way more resources, was spying on the users more and more. Office has similar story, peak of usability was maybe 2007 with ribbon introduction (which still a lot of power users hated with passion since it was far from clean design, more seemingly designed by committee of marketing guys).