alt Hacker NewsThey have a lot of staff turnover too, and each generation of new SDE has less of a clue how the old stuff worked. So when they're tasked with replacing the old stuff, they don't understand what it does, and the rewrite ends up doing less.
That was my impression of one of the major problems when I worked there 2008-2011. But I don't think it's just one problem.
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pjmlp • last Saturday at 9:05 AM
I can confirm, the guys still around for WinUI team and related frameworks, always appear clueless when posed questions about Windows features they were supposed to know about.
Just go watch a few recordings on their YouTube channel.
Raymond Chen tries to document it, but he's just one person.
I think that because their total compensation is lower than FAANG, especially at senior levels, and they are seen as uncool, they sometimes have issues retaining top-notch talent. It's paradoxical, because MS Research is probably the best PLT organization in the world. But they have failed to move a lot of that know-how into production.
Besides, because it's an older company, it might have more organizational entropy, i.e. dysfunctional middle-management. As you say it's probably several other causes too. But still, hard to understand how they can create F#, F*, and Dafny, just to name a few, and fail with their mainstream products.