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.
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.
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
systems gradually becoming a Jenga tower
Love this metaphor :)
I’m terrified I’ll never be able to find somewhere to work where this isn’t the case. Deeply terrified.
having been part of the Windows team since 1/1/2013
If he worked on Windows 11 he’s the part of the problem.
