Re:The End of Windows
by JoeAltmaier on Monday April 02, 2018 @10:11AM
(#16734576)
I think because there's no career advancement at Microsoft, working on cleaning up existing features. Only by working on new stuff can you get noticed.
So, interns work on 'old' stuff (like office apps, Windows, tools). And they always look pretty rough.
Interns don’t do maintenance work in general. They build new stuff, often flashy new stuff that never ships [1], because the intern program is about evaluating potential hires and giving them a great experience so they want to come back. Giving interns tedious unrecognized maintenance work is a great way to convince them to go elsewhere.
Source: Microsoft employee
[1] The goal is still to build features that ship, but because they get new, shiny stuff, sometimes it’s speculative development and the winds shift before it goes out the door.
Re:The End of Windows
by JustSomeNobody on Monday April 02, 2018 @10:34AM
(#16734789)
That's pretty much how it works everywhere. There's no career, or even pay, advancement for people who like to do this sort of work. You're called a "maintenance programmer" which people take to mean you're not very good. On the contrary, a lot of those types of developers are very good. Better than the people who initially wrote the code and jumped ship when the bugs started rolling in that they couldn't fix. They understand the system and the business much better than the talky-talky system architecture wanna-bes.
Whew, that turned into a rant quickly. I've just seen plenty of strong, smart developers get screwed because they don't do flashy work.
Re:The End of Windows
by JoeAltmaier on Monday April 02, 2018 @10:17AM
(#16734640)
...as attested to by my relatives and friends who work there.
Am I remembering the timing wrong? XP came after 2000 and before Vista, right?
In all honesty that's been my impression of Windows since its inception. The only time I can recall ever feeling like Windows was deserved market leader was with Windows 2000: Linux wasn't mature on the desktop, OS X wasn't yet released or literally only just released and OS 9 was god awful (worse than the Win 95 in my opinion). The only platform that really competed in technical merit was BeOS and we all know how that ended up.
Win 3.x felt like a huge step backwards from what Atari, Amiga and Apple were doing. Windows 9x was an improvement but slow and buggy. Windows XP took a long time to mature - years and two service packs in fact. And before then it was basically just a slower (bar start up time), uglier version of Win 2000. And by the time Microsoft recovered from the cluster fuck of Longhorn OS X and Linux were both streets ahead in terms of stability, usability and even just basic features.
There are obviously people who genuinely warm to Windows and prefer that as a platform - good for them; variety is the spice of life and all - but from a technical standpoint Windows has always felt like it's had a multitude of low hanging fruit which aren't trendy enough for Redmond to invest development time in (case in point: why did it take until Windows 10 before shortcut keys were added to cmd.exe? And then why did MS stop there? The terminal emulator still totally sucks compared to nearly every other ever made!)