I work in azure. It’s a mess, but what large system isn’t. Now extrapolate the to one of the biggest systems in existence.

The only reason a low level employee like OP is emailing satya is because they have a personality disorder or are having a psychotic break, which is pretty clear from OP’s manifesto

Lol, no.

It is true that writing to the board will get you noticed, and that you might not like the consequences. If you value having the job then don’t write to the board. Even if you are right, being noticed like that isn’t going to endear you to your boss.

But if you care more about doing the right thing then writing to the board is the right thing to do. And after a few years of working at Microsoft you might not value your job very much either and you too might decide to go out in style.

Go watch the last episode of Chernobyl again.

Thanks for the free psychology assessment, I appreciate it, but I believe I’m fine. The series omits lots of details.

Hi, I hope you are doing good. From my personal experience, complaining about your manager to skip level manager is called Career Suicide.

There is nothing good that can come out of it,, except getting fired.

It is, but “Microsoft runs on trust” they say. They also say the CEO’s inbox is always open, actually the CEO himself says it in the yearly mandatory training video on business conduct. So it should be safe, in theory, to openly speak out in the best interest of the customers, no? Rhetorical question :)

Don't believe everything people say. Watch what they do.

By the way, are you not worried about NDAs and such?

Yes, there is how things are said to work, and how they actually work.

I feel like emailing the CEO in this case is just a no-op, the inbox is gatekeeped by his staff and very unlikely he saw your email.

That said, “inbox always open” means you should come with a problem AND a very well detailed solution. But question becomes if you had a detailed solution that was good, why wasn’t it ran up the org chart with buy in and why did it have to skip to the top.

The answer is “intricate politics and misplaced personal interests.”

But that's part of a great solution... it sounds like you might have had a good technical solution, but that's only half the solution in enterprise. If your technical solution requires another team to completely retool, its not a great solution overall.

it is not. the real world says one thing and does another.

here is how real world tech companies actually function: https://www.seangoedecke.com/how-to-ship/

It reminded me of this one:

https://wtfmitchel.medium.com/how-to-get-fired-from-microsof...

A lot of similarities, except the medium author was not part of PG but support. He also had recently suffered a brain injury.

Before or after publishing his article?

like 5 minutes after.

It was the genesis of the events in the article.

"While some may see this as a dick move and I wasn’t exactly proud of it, but I actually waited for Daniel’s wife, Katie, to go into labor before bringing all of this up with his management."

Holy cow! Now I've unfortunately witnessed some ugly office behavior too, but this is quite another level.

Redacted to avoid getting doxxed (my original reply showed disdain for the parent comment and agreed with Axel's writing).

Former 1010 Overlake RnD here too :)

Windows is ~500 times bigger than Azure, give or take, by machine count, and still many times larger by loc, modules, users, whatever else you want to measure. The heavy lifting (VM/containers, I/O, the things that cannot not be done just like that) is handled by the Windows folks anyway. The only hard part is the VM placement, everything else is mostly regular software engineering, some of medium-hard complexity but nothing that can excuse the need for constant human intervention.

from a philosophy grad. both these responses are logical fallacies.

1: it's bad, but so is everything else (ad populum, everyone does it so it's ok).

2: it can only be because the author has a personality disorder or psychotic break (ad hominem)

I didn’t say it went well. Actually I said it didn’t go well :(

Yes, but you are writing as if you expected it to go well.

I’d say they’re writing as if they expect everyone to share their ideals, and they’re responding to violations of those ideals in a naive and disempowered way. That doesn’t mean they’re wrong in those ideals, but the way they tried to fix things… they interacted with Cutler, why didn’t they try to influence him to fix things? Or any other senior technical leaders?

I never said I didn’t. It was a multi-year escalation and I shared my concerns widely along with concrete options.

The thing is in corporate environments people avoid admitting anything is wrong because that would make them look bad and also disavows the bosses who promoted them, so the true best interest of the company takes a back seat.

Yeah I get that, I have been in a similar situation. At some point you just want to pull the trigger instead of going along with values that aren't yours. Sure, there is always the way of just silently disagree and move on, but who cares. We live one life not to maximize our careers, but to be who we are. Was an interesting read and wish all the best to you in the future.