How Microsoft Vaporized a Trillion Dollars

https://isolveproblems.substack.com/p/how-microsoft-vaporized-a-trillion

169 points · 15 comments · view on lemmy.world

15 Comments

mayabuttreeks@lemmy.ca · 90 pts · 148d (7 replies)

Oy. Sadly, I suspect anybody who has worked in dev knows the outlines of this story: Management promising deliverables with unrealistic timelines and functionality; team leads with such poor internal product knowledge they don't recognize catastrophic issues until it's too late; poorly-trained devs squeezed to push out unscalable kludgy insecure nightmares "for now" that just never get addressed; systems gradually becoming a Jenga tower of manual workarounds and undocumented slapdash quick fixes... Ugh. Nightmare fuel.

okwhateverdude@lemmy.world · 37 pts · 148d

The new twist to this story is those poorly-trained devs are given robot powerloaders for producing code now so they can slop out each teetering jenga block that much faster

baronvonj@piefed.social · 18 pts · 148d

There's nothing as permanent as a temporary fix.

Zwuzelmaus@feddit.org · 16 pts · 148d

systems gradually becoming a Jenga tower

Love this metaphor :)

SharkAttak@kbin.melroy.org · 8 pts · 148d

This, and all the people coming and going leaving undocumented Jenga parts behind.

thedeadwalking4242@lemmy.world · 8 pts · 148d (1 reply)

I'm terrified I'll never be able to find somewhere to work where this isn't the case. Deeply terrified.

baggachipz@sh.itjust.works · 12 pts · 148d

I’ve been around a long time, and I have bad news for you….

leriotdelac@lemmy.zip · 5 pts · 147d

Interesting. Same in construction industry!

rimu@piefed.social · 38 pts · 148d

A very entertaining read. I'm completely unsurprised, based on my experience trying to use Azure. Garbage platform.

And now they're hacking on that shitshow with CoPilot. Jesus wept.

doodledup@lemmy.world · 15 pts · 147d (1 reply)

TLDR: A former Azure Core engineer details how Microsoft risked losing OpenAI and government trust due to complacent decisions, including a plan to port half of Windows to a tiny chip, which the engineer deemed impossible. This mismanagement, among other issues, potentially cost Microsoft a trillion dollars in market capitalization and led to wasted engineering efforts.

WhyJiffie@sh.itjust.works · 2 pts · 144d

This mismanagement, among other issues, potentially cost Microsoft a trillion dollars in market capitalization

so far

no idea how are they getting out of this trouble

balian@lemmy.libertarianfellowship.org · 11 pts · 148d
FiniteBanjo@feddit.online · 8 pts · 148d (1 reply)

lmfao

Article proposes that losing trust from OpenAI and the US Government are the causes of their woes, when truly the opposite is the case. OpenAI and the US Government are the reason why everyone hates MacroSlop and all of their products are rapidly degrading.1

ranzispa@mander.xyz · 7 pts · 147d

The article discussed in depth how bad technical decisions made Microsoft product bad quality and unreliable. They they propose that this is the reason why Microsoft lost potential contracts with openai.

BlackLaZoR@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 148d

having been part of the Windows team since 1/1/2013

If he worked on Windows 11 he's the part of the problem.