AbbeFaria

No, I was in a team in Azure E+P (Edge and Platform). I don’t want to reveal the team as I would out myself.

I didn't get it wrong. I am okay to play politics if there's a prize worth taking, working on impactful products or learning new skills but if all there is to grab is titles or better pay then playing politics is playing the short game.

I am merely 30-years old, hopefully I have a long career or at-least as long as possible but playing politics to play the short game is very short sighted to say the least.

If I want politics, I would rather just re-watch Game of Thrones.

> how many people would work on a typical Microsoft product, and what sort of calibre are they?

There are high talent density orgs at MSFT too. I do not want to give the impression that everyone at MSFT is low calibre. I was at the beginning of the Security org being formed (back then it was a tiny part of E+D). I was a minion who witnessed Security transforming into a 10B+ USD business so there are very qualified people at MSFT. We went from a few hundred devs and PMs to ~10K devs, PMs, Support etc to work on a mature business. There are a host of talented people still at MSFT, also MS continues to publish impactful research in AI, Systems etc. The great Leslie Lamport is still at MSFT. I am not comparing myself to these titans, I am nowhere near that level but just saying that there are oodles of talent at MSFT.

On the other hand, here is an example that is illustrative of the sort of people I encountered towards the end of my tenure. My last manager who was one big reason behind me resigning once told me in my 1-on-1 that I should count myself lucky to be employed at MSFT and that other developers would kill to join MSFT. This was someone who had started his career in TCS, Wipro etc and then worked at a bunch of networking companies who presumably didn't pay that well. Everyone at MSFT is decently paid because the stock is doing well and long may that continue . My last team/org was a 30M$+ business with only one customer, we had maybe ~300 people altogether in the US, UK and India. It felt like we were always support engineers for this one big whale of a customer and we were trying to "pivot" to get more customers but that always seemed fanciful as the product was expressly designed for one customer. MSFT acqui-hired from this customer multiple execs and developers to sell said product to the same customer. I am missing a lot of key details as I wasn't at the inception of this product but the whole org seemed dysfunctional, inefficient and certainly I had low-morale. There just wasn't as much work for that many people.

When I submitted my resignation, they actually tried to retain me! I was befuddled to say the least, I hadn't been that productive at all but I guess they just needed warm bodies to work on some other misguided initiative. Personally, I had enough. I forewent my last tranche of sign-on stocks (a non-trivial amount) but was glad to see the back of this org. It was deleterious to my career, I was so pissed that I didn't even send a farewell email. I don;t blame anyone but myself, I hold myself accountable for my career but this was what I perceived.

Apologies, this felt like a rant and it is partly one. But I never had a frank conversation about this with anyone after I left. My fiance is a Doctor so she can't understand all this but my fellow colleagues in tech will.

I am speaking of the time from 2024 to mid-2025. While upper management was pushing developers to use Copilot, it was still not prevalent.

Post mid-2025, there were mandates to use it wherever we could.

You underestimate how many old-timers are there at MSFT. I don’t imply any negative connotations to that.

But these are the most lucratively paid employees. These are also the same folks that are used to working at the same company and who might find it trying to interview elsewhere.

Ex-MSFT here. I resigned in June, I was an L63. I spent 8 years at MSFT across two stints.

My last 18 months at MSFT were deeply unproductive. Constant reorgs, the work not being aligned to my capabilities and unfortunately just the general feeling that I was under worked and had very little opportunity for career advancement.

I would look at my colleagues and sister teams and wonder, why do they need these many people to work on something so trivial ? Or how did this person get promoted for doing that work ? I am sure envy played a part in the second question but it was legitimate. Remember, all this was before LLM tools were prevalent.

In the end, I left off my own volition. In my last 6 months, I did very little work, if at all any. I thought why am I being paid so handsomely for such little and trivial work. I did try interviewing in a few different teams but didn’t make it (Azure Files and Hyperscale DB). If I had stayed, I would have been swiftly laid off or if I was lucky enough last long till this buyout.

I think same is true for all Big Tech companies. Too many employees doing not enough or quality work.

The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins

Try doing the assignments from MIT 6.5840 Distributed Systems course by Morris and Kaashoek.

I am going through this right now. I finished Lab 3. I also made my own notes about some of the papers they discuss, specifically Spanner.

https://sudk1896.github.io/2026/09/03/Spanner-notes.html

Highly recommend this course.

As the old saying at MSFT goes, “Shipping is a feature”.

There are a sizeable number of Meta employees that have jobs due to Zuck’s sheer generosity and the fact that he cares about his public image and laying them off in service of Meta’s bottom line won’t look good.

Elon firing half of Twitter just normalized layoffs to such an extent that it’s considered par for the course now, of course macroeconomic conditions have changed but layoffs were always a bit taboo in tech.

To all the sheep at Meta who weren’t sacrificed because Zuck thought it would look too bad on him, how do you know your game is up at Meta ?

As a measly backend programmer, I only have a good mental model of a “lock”, think a sync.Mutex in Golang.

But I wanted to go deeper into the rabbit hole and understand concepts like memory ordering and how atomic operations are actually implemented using the abstractions hw provides.

Any book recommendations or exercises I could do to learn more about this. Thanks.

It’s the nature of our jobs. The artefacts we produce, code and documentation are out in the open, available freely for training LLMs.

That’s not true for highly qualified doctors, patient case histories, patient feedback that helps doctors diagnose or treat patients or for surgeons to operate on patients. All of these actions are high stakes, get it wrong and people could die, AI would never be able to replace them.

I know it’s a troll, This was no MOOC. I didn’t even get a certificate.

I saw the job opening in the careers portal and just cold DM’d the HM. As to why I DM’d, what do I have to lose ? I was already working at MSFT in a different team. The worst that could happen was that he would just ignore the message. Also, I didn’t nag the HM, it was just one DM where I summarised the things I did in the course. He then asked me to send me my resume and that was it.

I “audited” CMU 15-445 in April 2026, a few months ago. I then applied to Azure Hyperscale DB team, and as my pitch to get hired I cold DM’d the hiring manager whatever I finished in the assignments (BPM, Concurrent B-tree, Transaction support etc).

With that, I was able to get the interview although I ended up failing it. My lack of experience in C++ was probably one of the main reasons. Your course helped me stand my own during the interview and even though I had zero database experience apart from finishing the course, I felt adequately prepared.

Thank you for making the course open source. As a working professional, it was helpful to be able to do the course on my own time. Suffice to say, I am a big fan of your work and thank you for introducing me (and other fellow learners) to the interesting world of Databases!

I have been seeing this in my engineering org too. Sentences begin with “My agent said this” etc. This is frustrating on so many levels, developers don’t put any thought into the cognitive load that these artefacts generate.

I am going to share this writing with everyone in my org. Succinctly written and golden advice.

Reminds me of that scene in Silicon Valley, where they show the optimistic Hooli Ad which Gavin Belson labels a “tampon ad” and then proceeds to blast his entire C-suite to outcompete Pied Piper.

I haven’t watched the lectures yet. Reading the papers and using Claude/GPT to ask for references etc is good enough for me. I did watch a few, ones on GFS and Raft but didn’t see the ROI, lectures are too long. Reading the papers multiple times and reading blogs, references and asking Q’s to GPT is what I am doing.

Obviously for the assignments themselves, I use AI sparingly. Mostly as a sounding board when I have doubts or to know how to do something in golang, since it isn’t my primary programming language.

Note, I am not asking for solutions like “implement Append Entries RPC”, the solutions are public so AI could probably implement everything. My workflow is to implement it first, debug test failures, go through each individual test and then come up with clarifying Q’s, such as the one below,

In Raft paper by Ongaro et al, for the below condition, If there exists an N such that N > commitIndex, a majority of matchIndex[i] ≥ N, and log[N].term == currentTerm: set commitIndex = N (§5.3, §5.4).

Is commitIndex changed only when we receive a successful reply for Append Entries ?

Lastly I have an AGENTS.md that prohibits GPT from giving solutions directly, that would defeat the purpose of doing the assignments. It was used in one of Stanford’s GenAI course, look it up.

+1 to this. I am on Assignment 3D (dealing with log compaction in Raft). I have learnt more about Distributed Systems just by "auditing" this course.

For Paxos, I also recommend reading Paxos v Raft, Have we reached consensus on distributed consensus ? by Heidi Howard et al. It explains Multi-paxos by using the style and abstractions from the Raft paper, which makes it much more understandable. Paxos can be intimidating but this was the paper that made it click for me.

I highly recommend doing the labs from 6.824.

I know the article is AI slop just by the structure, my last job at MSFT had me producing artefacts like this, which is why I quit ;)

The issue with buying land outside major metro areas like BLR are the following,

1. Irregular power supply. I lived 2 hours outside of BLR in a village and the power would regularly go off for minimum of 3 hours, sometimes more. The current KA government made a promise to voters to supply subsidised power and the downstream effect of this is that they must mandatorily supply power to BLR which is the only economic engine of KA. Consequently they end up shafting everyone else.

2. Poor education quality. The best teachers and smartest students are concentrated in BLR, unless you are willing to homeschool or are fine with your child not getting the best, this is a difficult tradeoff to live with.

3. Narrow minded people in villages. Unless you live in touristy areas like Coorg, CKM etc you will not find the diversity that you find in a big city like BLR.

4. Less than ideal medical care. Most villages don’t have the sort of hospitals and doctors you would find in BLR. The best doctors who would be the best paid won’t come to villages. Although I did live near a teaching hospital and the medical care there was average. If you’re a healthy individual, you might ignore this.

Surprisingly the roads were decent, a result of being near a highway and having very low population density.

Apart from these, I was living a “slow life”, had great AQI (most days), wide open spaces, great and cheap food. If you’re fine with the shortcomings, buying land in and around major cities is affordable but the shortcomings I mentioned are real and I don’t see them going away anytime soon.

As to the efforts to decongest BLR, there are quite a few like Bidadi township but they are are more like bringing BLR style haphazard development to the outskirts, but these things are still very much in the nascent stage now.

Meta is a cash generating behemoth. They have such a well oiled ad machine that it’s going to be a long time before they destroy themselves. Case in point, they look fine financially even after burning mountains of cash on the Metaverse.

I would worry about Meta dying only when people stop using IG, which they clearly are NOT. IG is firmly entrenched in modern society and culture, they make insane amounts of money off of that.

One thing is becoming more and more clear though, their AI efforts are going nowhere. I would be interested in where they end up in the AI race, they are never going to get as much mindshare as Claude, Codex or Gemini.

Excess verbiage in communication. Design docs, root cause debriefs etc all are clearly AI generated with little thought to whether they are helpful to the reader. They are certainly helpful to the writer as they can just offload it to the AI.

Its hard to discern the kernel of truth that the author is trying to communicate. So much of documentation is now AI generated and rarely does it help in understanding code bases or diagnosing issues in production.

This was my experience at MSFT for the past year or so.

> So you and OP believe that, these systems are good indicators of skills, so much that the last statement sounds normal?

Op here, yes I do believe, the levels aren’t perfect though. I believe in them because I was once L60 and L61, I knew intimately what was expected of me then and I can assure you the work I was doing as an L63 could be done by someone few levels down, which is to say I was underutilised. The team was also not the right fit for me.

Levels tell you two things, the scope and autonomy you get in your work and more importantly compensation. From the compensation view point, it does tend to be “gamed” frequently by developers hired from outside who might be out earning devs promoted within.

Have no idea why people here are picking up on MSFT’s levelling system? I didn’t invent it.And it actually starts at L59.

The point I made was that as an SSE (L63), there’s a certain amount of scope and autonomy that is expected neither of which I was getting and hence I resigned. I am not trying to bully or denigrate anyone junior.

The levelling system specifies the output and the characteristics of the output expected out of an engineer, that’s it. Whether I believe in it or not is beside the point, I was in the system so I did believe it otherwise progressing through my career would have been impossible.

You are not alone. I was in this exact same position at MSFT and I put in my resignation. I am an L63 but the work I was doing, was something an L60-L61 could do and I frequently felt I was in one of those Bullshit jobs (courtesy of David Graeber). I was paid handsomely but once the sign on stock ran out, I saw that I was staying in the job just for security. I felt like one of those Hooli engineers who were sunbathing at the Hooli office terrace waiting for their stocks to vest. I am only 9 years into my career and I didn’t see that as the optimal thing for my career rn.

I didn’t have any major financial obligations like you though, so it was a much simpler decision for me.

Hang in there buddy and also thanks for the deeply human comment.

Here’s my take as an Indian having lived in cities like Mumbai, Hyderabad and Bengaluru

1. No manufacturing expertise in India, we aren’t a manufacturing powerhouse despite having similar levels of population as China. We have always prioritised services. That has an inherent limit.

2. Local governments here are powerless. I don’t have the source for this but only about 3% of public spending is done by local governments at the municipal level. Even for “rich” cities, local governments although are wealthy they are always controlled by whoever has power at the state level. It’s why Indian cities have such decrepit infrastructure vis a vis China.

3. Caste based politics and more recently freebies based politics. Recently, state governments all over India have been all out bribing voters with cash transfers if voted to power. This won’t bode well for long term financial stability. This is also short term thinking at its finest. They have run out of ideas.

4. Weak rule of law. There’s a huge backlog of cases in our justice system right from Supreme Court to the local courts. Doing business in India can backfire in spectacular ways (inordinate tax demands by union government etc).

Entire studies can be done but these are top 4 things keeping India where it is.

Is this course still available? What about the course materials? I know it will be dated but if so can someone pls share the links. Tried searching for it on google but couldn’t find it.

It’s more nuanced than that. There are lines of business where there is plenty of growth and places where growth has stagnated or business is decelerating.

In the former, you can see some of the products that MSFT is shipping such as MAIA chips, Azure Horizon DB, MSFT Fabric, Sovereign clouds etc. These businesses are seeing steady growth and there’s plenty of work to be done whereas for products like IoT, XBox and anything to do with gaming in general etc you will see that there isn’t much growth left and yet these products have a lot of headcount behind them.

So MSFT isn’t stagnating (revenue keeps increasing). Although there are quite a few businesses within MSFT that can use a lot of headcount reduction, this is my take as a low level L63 grunt.