alt Hacker NewsI 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.
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You also probably couldn't pay me enough to work in the kind of environment that produces such buggy software as Microsoft teams. A message based app which can't even guarantee delivery of messages, or synchronization across devices isn't a good sign for management and delivery.
Back when I was there, part of my calculus was that cost of living in Seattle was cheaper than the bay. It was about 35% cheaper back then, according to regional CPI data I looked at at the time. Not sure what the difference is today. I believe housing is still substantially cheaper.
I think a few years after I left when more Big Tech opened offices in Seattle, competing companies started paying Bay Area salaries for Seattle living, removing this argument. I haven't watched this closely in recent years.
But fwiw, I was able to save and invest a lot in my Seattle days, despite a salary that was lower than in the bay.
Because those languages were created at Microsoft Research, not DevDiv nor Windows.
All different business units.
Is compensation really the issue? Like, people earning 160k simply can’t take a dive into the OS source code and make proper fixes, but people earning 250k magically can?
I don't know. I know there are a lot of people who want to work on the OS source code, given the chance, but need some hand holding in the beginning. Companies in general are not willing to give them the chance, because they don't want to hand hold them.
> dysfunctional middle-management
I thought about this a lot while working at a high-growth company recently.
Decided that regular (quarterly) manager rankings (HR-supported, anonymous) by 2-3 levels of subordinates is the only way to solve this at scale.
The central problem is: assuming a CEO accidentally promoted a bad middle manager, then how do they ever find out?
Most companies (top-down rankings-only) use project success as their primary manager performance signal.
Unfortunately, this has 3 problems: (1) project success doesn't prove a manager isn't bad, (2) above-managers only hear from managers, and (3) it incentivizes managers to hack project success metrics / definitions.
Adding a servant/leader skip-level metric is a critical piece of information on "On, this person is toxic and everyone thinks poorly of them, despite the fact that they say everyone loves them."