> What are we reading here? These are extraordinary statements. Also with apparent credibility.

I left Microsoft in 2014. Already back then I could see this sort of stuff starting to happen.

The Office Org was mostly immune from it because they had a lot of lifers, people who had been working on the same code for decades and who thought through changes slowly.

But even by 2014 there were problems hiring developers who knew C++, or who wanted to learn it. COM? No way. One one team we literally had to draw straws once to determine who was going to learn how to write native code for Windows.

It wasn't even a talent thing, Windows development skills are a career dead end outside of Microsoft. They used to be a hot commodity, and Microsoft was able to hire the best of the best from industry. Now they have to train people up, and Microsoft doesn't offer any of the employment perks that they used to use to attract top talent (Seattle used to be a low CoL area, everyone had private offices, job stability).

When I started at Microsoft in 2007, the interview bar included deep knowledge of how computers worked. It wasn't unusual to have meetings drop down to talking about assembly code. Your first day after orientation was a bunch of computer parts and you were told to "figure out how to setup your box".

Antivirus wasn't mandatory. The logic was if you got a virus, they made a mistake hiring you and you deserved to be fired.

When your average developer can go that deep on any topic, you can generally leave engineers well enough alone and get good software.