This is exactly what I thought would happen when they gutted their QA staff and reassigned the surviving testers as developers. Your employees act in accordance with their incentives, and the incentives aren't there for QA. Microsoft made it clear that they only value feature development and shipping, and their employees now associate "doing QA" with "being fired en masse".
To corrupt a phrase, they've crapped their bed and now they have to lie in it.
Edited to add: I'm not some hardcore "M$FT SUXXXX" guy. I like and use their products, but I'm deeply concerned about the direction the company seems to be heading.
This is pretty spot on. The process of reviews is one of the most corrosive elements of working at Microsoft. However, there's more to the story. MS fumbled a huge opportunity in the way they reacted to the financial crisis and recession. They put the vast majority of promotions and bonuses on hold. Keep in mind that this is a company that has tens of billions of dollars in cash on hand. More so, this is a company with an "up or out" philosophy baked into it (and that's a big reason for the review system). Due to fear and lack of leadership the company saved spending who knows how many millions of dollars and in the process drove away a lot of their best talent and lost out on hiring a lot of new talent as well. The way they went about layoffs didn't help either, with lots of little layoffs instead of one big purge and done (so that the remaining folks didn't have to question their job security every day). Instead of projecting strength they projected weakness, and they paid dearly for it.
But beyond all that it's the increasing culture of bureaucracy that's eaten away at MS. All the reorgs treating developers as nothing more than assembly line workers. All the incompetent middle managers and PMs that are 10x harder to get rid of than incompetent devs. All the silly out of order budget and management priorities. There's only so many times that an individual can pour their heart into a job and see nothing of substance come of it before they decide to move on to greener pastures.
The worst part of the whole thing is that few people realize the significant amount of lag between when a company starts falling down before it hits bottom. Losing a ton of talented devs probably won't stop you from shipping the current version of whatever is in the pipeline, or even the next version. It'll just mean a lot of projects that would have been conceived won't be, and it'll be harder to execute on a lot of projects that should have been a slam dunk. More so, being able to work with more talented devs is a big perk for other devs, which will tend to accelerate the exodus at all levels. And typically people will make up their mind to leave months or even years before they actually do. By the time it's actually supremely obvious that all the good talent has left it's far too late to do anything about it.
Microsoft was all about this while I was there. It was incredible how much permission you needed to do anything. When I left I found an almost uniform response from other ex-MSFT employees that they "just couldn't get shit done" while there.
To play Devil’s advocate, perhaps that team never delivered anything, despite consisting of (presumably) talented engineers. I’ve seen several “brilliant but unaccomplished” teams that never actually ship anything but nonetheless manage to hang around due to the raw intelligence of their team members. It can be hard to let someone go who talks like an accomplished CS professor at every meeting, but does little besides that.
>It looks more like a spreadsheet driven culling of the product lines.
You’d think a company as successful as Microsoft would be above such ineffective, morale-crushing moves (also profit-crushing, assuming the people being fired were actually productive), but then again, if this article [0] (and associated HN comments) are to be believed, Microsoft isn’t exactly optimizing [fh]iring decisions based on performance.
The spamming (and outright lying) from MS reps was pretty ridiculous. At a prior employer we couldn’t tell if our rep was clueless or unethical. We raised to three iterations of bosses but his leadership changed annually so he was never held to account. Finally a user revolt caused them to lose an $8mm deal. Even then they reassigned him rather than fire him.
I’m impressed that they’ve moved on from being a Windows and Office company but their culture hasn’t caught up.
No, I read the whole thing. It brought to mind the protestations that eliminating dedicated QA teams at Microsoft wouldn't cause any problems, because now quality would be everyone's responsibility.
100% percent of the reason I didn't go work 'for' Microsoft was that I'd be a temp-to-possibly-hire contractor. And from the former contractors I'd talked to (one recommended by the recruiter!), it was clear contractors were treated like second-class citizens by Microsoft. From what I was told, contractors couldn't participate in networking events or even get free food employees got because Microsoft was sued for misclassifying workers.
So instead of reforming their business model they just switched to a model where they made clear contractors were contractors--by treating them like trash. Fuck that.
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