Oh please. Do you really think that MS has nobody with any level of competency on any single team in their entire org? Do you really think that low of others? Could it possibly be that sometimes... things have bugs? Shit breaks in ways you don't expect. Things happen.
Painting an entire group of people you've never met with such a large brush is gross. It's just software and these are just people.
I dunno, let's see:
> Microsoft doesn't have any competent developers working on the Windows user interfaces
Looks like I am specifically calling out one subset here in particular. So I would say that no, no I don't believe what you're implying I believe.
> Could it possibly be that sometimes... things have bugs? Shit breaks in ways you don't expect. Things happen.
Bugs happen to everyone, but the people working on the Windows interfaces have poor architectural choices, nonsensical user-hostile decisions, and a history of reinventing the wheel with slower (and buggier!), less featureful, interfaces.
> Painting an entire group of people you've never met with such a large brush is gross. It's just software and these are just people.
This is the image they project into the world, if they want to be thought of differently then they should actually do something to project that image instead.
There are a LOT of us out here that remember how well things were designed and implemented 20, 30, and 40 years ago, and how disgustingly broken everything is now, and how everyone nowadays ACCEPTS THIS AS NORMAL.
Microsoft Teams is a steaming pile of shit. Windows Desktop Explorer is a steaming pile of shit. The XAML bullshit they're using for the Start Menu button in Windows 10 (and I'm guessing Windows 11, since I am not going to be installing it) is a steaming pile of shit. Microsoft's invasive advertising and telemetry IN A DESKTOP OPERATING SYSTEM is a steaming pile of shit.
People need to stop pretending this shit isn't broken. People need to stop calling people who point out how fucking broken this shit is "trolls".
* Blog complains about Windows being a mess
* Comments about how the Mac workflow is better
* Blog complains about how the Mac is too restricted
* Comments about how Linux is finally good now®
* Blog complains about Linux desktop
* Comments about how WSL2 saved them from the nightmare that is GNOME/KDE/etc
repeat ad nauseum
Previously on more user friendly distros like Ubuntu I didn't feel that the advantages over Windows were significant enough to warrant certain software suites being unavailable (adobe, autocad, etc.). And lightweight distros like Arch caused too much headache even with the wiki and knowing "what you were doing."
Arch now feels both relatively easy to use day to day, while still being incredibly customizable with almost no bloatware. The only real problem is certain almost non-negotiable utilities like PulseAudio not necessarily being as high quality as most of the user utilities.
I absolutely refuse to use an operating system for casual use that requires daily terminal knowledge and endless googling to remember and use.
It is what it is, but I do enough of this stuff professionally that I want an operating system that works from the second you push the power button with peripherals and software that work instantly after plugging in.
The second I'm digging through old forums looking for some multi-line arcane terminal script to paste to make things work, I boot back into something else and delete the linux partition
If you complain your mechanic is slow and expensive, a load of other mechanics will come and tell you (and probably rightly so) that the job is more difficult and complex than you know of. But you don't see that often with devs, which is a bit disappointing.
Of course you could say they should stand up against this, but again, whilst theres this hostility towards other devs, why are you going to risk not being able to put food on the table for someone on the internet who thinks your an idiot?
(As an aside, the analogy doesn't really stretch that far since developers are hired by companies whereas mechanics are paid directly by customers. Perhaps car designers would be a better fit here, but again, other car designers would be quick to point out the problems with your complaints, but thats by the by)
Very few developers are in the position of starving if they refuse to implement terrible ideas. If they are in that position, fine, but at least feel an appropriate amount of shame for the garbage you're making.
> Perhaps car designers would be a better fit here, but again, other car designers would be quick to point out the problems with your complaints, but thats by the by
I think the car designer version supports what I'm saying: Tesla wants to replace the steering wheel with a yoke and people are rightly criticizing them for it.
(I tried passive aggressively quitting by insisting they put my day rate up expecting them to say no but they did)
Surprisingly I have heard of this being done. Mechanics placing stickers on windows without permission.
Jesus Christ, is the dealership playing me to advertise their business on the item I just paid them money for?! If not, then take that branding shit off!
As I said, could be wrong though, maybe developers arent alone in not liking each other
of course there are other groups of people that don't like other people. have you seen the world today?
Of course I'm not dead serious, but there is some seriousness implied. You called out devs specifically not being alone in not liking one another. I made a reference to another profession that doesn't like their direct related counterparts. What in the world did you think that meant? There are not chefs that don't like other chefs or that there are not chefs that don't like devs?
Sorry, this bugs me. Forming groups of humans that dislike other groups of humans is as old as humanity itself.
It kind of makes sense actually, of course I hear of more developers being hostile to other developers compared to say mechanics, but that could be because I hear from more developers full stop. There's probably a term for it and everything.
That being said, I'm sure I've come across a lot more camaraderie amongst other professions than developers. Anecdotally, I know theres been a few times I've complained about or seen people complain about a certain profession and seen a wave of posts come in from other workers defending them. Then again, its possible those just stick out in my mind more than the many times that presumably hasn't happened.
Well, to be fair, the cause and effect in this case shouldn't even be connected in a way that allows for this. It's like a bad CD in your car stereo causing your engine to fail. A smart car manufacturer makes it so that the data bus cannot send information from the public areas to the engine area. A bad car manufacturer does not put up those blocks.
They crash all the time. They’re absolutely awful quality. they are made almost exclusively with cheap foreign engineering. It’s really the wild west when it comes to things.
The vehicle interfaces are usually subsystem modules in the radio. Your Linux side talks to your “vehicle side” over usb, uart, SPI, etc. There is still a good module there most of the time, but it has 100% trust of its main processor.
Since 2018, US vehicles since almost all come with a firewall to separate the radio/telemetric/infotainment busses from the vehicle busses.
Their solution wasn’t to harden the fancy systems, it was just to separate them from the important ones. So the vulnerabilities are still there, just moved a little.
I despise these big stupid complicated displays that encourage accidents.
A catastrophic failure of the head unit can impact the electrical system which can do weird things with the spark plugs or other systems.
It broke because it could not hit an unessential cloud service. This is absolutely something someone should have expected.
It's ok, we rushed the implementation to meet this sprint's goals, the fix is part of the next sprint. /s
Putting time outs and other error handling around remote endpoints is prettier much the first lesson you’re taught when interfacing with remote end points.
Yes mistakes happen and I’ve seen other companies ship products that have failed in similar ways, but I’ve always believed Microsoft is thought of as a FANNG and to see a school boy error in their flag ship product a couple of months before it ships really makes me question the standard of leadership running the team.
Who’s QAing it? Why wasn’t those functions covered in unit tests? Who peer reviewed that code? And who’s running the development teams that allow all this guardrails to fail? It’s not just one engineer who had to fuck up to cause that bug.
That fixed release cycle might make certain things easier, but it also causes a forced lag on all changes and encourages shipping code that isn't actually complete so you don't have to tell people to wait another 2 weeks for the change.
I wish some of Kanban was more widely accepted, especially things like making sure you have enough worked planned in the backlog to just keep taking tasks and working on them till completion.
If you have Microsoft's resources, you should be able to compete with a good UI. They can't. To me, that's a sign of complete incompetence. Excuse it however you like, but those guys are getting paid and failing at the job.
I don't understand the need to apoligize for shit software. It's shit. I don't care that some idiot spent their whole life taking that shit. It still smells, looks, and tastes like shit. I'm not going to enjoy it as a delicacy because they "care".
It would look bad on my resume. And given how much of a mess it is, it sounds like a terribly stressful job. I think any dev who doesn't see those red flags (or care about them) is very, very likely incompetent.
Honestly, even they weren't it's like a self fulfilling prophecy. It's fairly incompetent to take a job that people believe is for incompetent people. Unless you totally turn shit around, which obviously nobody has.
He said no such thing.
Verbatim quote. The commenter being responded to said exactly that.
It seems the did in fact say such a thing that you said they didn't say.
I imagine you're misinterpreting what I said. That's reasonable, I can see how I was not clear.
I was saying that there's no way there's a single team at MS that does not have a competent person on it, not that there's no way ALL teams have 0 competent people on it.
Do not mistake domains you don't understand as being bad at things. Programs and extensions that are 26 years old are still running strong on Windows 10 today. The economy runs on ancient tools that rely on that compatibility.
Throwing together a pretty context menu isn't as important as making sure that all of the UI elements are accessible to screen readers and other tools. It's also trivial compared to ensuring that old programs that assumed they could just click on the third menu item to make something happen keep working even if you redesign the menu.
I realize most of the terrible bloat, adware, security holes etc are probably caused by external factors, but at some point I think it's important to take responsibility for your own work and either push back on or move on.
I have and regularly use machines with all the major desktop platforms in my house - Windows, OS X, Linux, Chrome OS. While I cycle between them, I strongly prefer the Windows machines. The alternatives are all are missing all sorts of window management things such as snapping to screen quadrants and multimon borders, keyboard shortcuts for moving and snapping windows. Monitors with different DPIs is a challenge on Mac and hopeless on Linux. There are all sorts of UI affordances in Windows to do things like open new copies of an app (middle click on the taskbar icon), close an app (middle click on the taskbar preview), and so on.
There are a number of changes I strongly disagree with in Windows 11 such as removing the ability to put the taskbar on the side, but as a whole I still think the Windows desktop is an excellent piece of software that's significantly more usable than the alternatives.
Its not ready for the desktop.
Oh, I'm not the only one thinking this then! That's good to know. For years I've been tinkering at the edges of this by having my own app launcher, and my own desktop widgets, and an explorer style start menu navigation app.
All I need is to hook into the systray (although, do I need that? it's just a distraction), and put together a good/fast app switcher app, and I could ditch explorer.exe and the startmenu app completely.
It’s compounded by clueless salespeople who don’t know their products well enough to push the improvements that their customers want.
Copy text and an image from an email? Images paste in all broken.
Copy just the image from the email? Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't.
Copy the image from the email, paste it into Paint, crop the canvas, then copy from Paint into whatever? Works every time.
Copy text, data, etc from wherever
Paste it into Notepad
Copy it again
Paste it where you want it and then apply any formatting according to the destination app's formatting rules
Not a great workaround but at least it works.
I also do that. I 100% attribute that to browsers and people who want to copy/paste HTML and have it all colorized and formatted in the destination app.
https://superuser.com/questions/407113/shortcut-in-word-or-e...
Someone in another comment here mentions Raymond Chen. He is from the "old Microsoft", and probably has significantly less power than he used to.
Supposedly there used to be all sorts of third party shells. Only thing I’ve found to still exist are a few black box ports though.
Everything I go near from them is a monumental crapfest these days. They could be a good platform if they stopped this schizophrenic direction changing and actually fixed shit rather than hiding it behind layers of new shit.
Perhaps we should consider software welfare as well.
“Clean up your shit or we’ll fine you”
It's simple really: Microsoft doesn't have any competent developers working on the Windows user interfaces. My guess is that if you display any competence you wind up being moved to somewhere they care about like Azure, PowerShell, or the licensing team.
At this point I'm wondering if it is worth trying to build my own desktop on top of Windows Server Core.