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.

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.

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 :)

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/

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

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.

"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.

Before or after publishing his article?

It was the genesis of the events in the article.

like 5 minutes after.

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 :)

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)