I have seen that too many times too in big companies, but I wouldn't say that it results in nothinghappens.jpg

It results in the equivalent of treating an infection with Tylenol rather than antibiotics. The exact symptom reported by a "Leader" will usually get fixed, but in a more of a "KPI hacking" rather than a fundamental fix to the problem. I have seen a "Leader" point to the staggering number of support tickets as a problem then have teams make it incredibility difficult to open a support ticket. The number of support tickets plummets and the first report to instruct their team to do so gets rewarded and all other teams follow suit. Have a leader point to complexity of the sign up process, and have teams "simplify" the signup process by just taking an email to create the account, then make the experience of doing anything post sign up a broken mess because you forgot to go into settings and filling up all the required details. Or have a leader complain about the install process like in this example, and have teams just bundle massive dependencies or make wide horrific modifications to the users machine to "simplify" the install process. Now suddenly installing a video editing software also modifies your default video player, your HDR or scaling settings, your audio device setup, and your keyboard layout (because why not?)

+1 on having the same observation but my conclusion is that the leaders failed first. Fear drives these organizations. The leaders created much of that fear. I have fearlessly (newly hired) taken on large responsibilities. Trust me that most people were right to be fearful and only through luck and good fortune did my responsible actions not bankrupt me or land me in jail, albite by a small margin.

I’ve had “Boss I can fix this in one line of code.” situations, but nobody of 6 people wanted to make the call despite involving themselves excessively.

So nothing got done.

So the temperature on the issue went up.

So management whose failure was their own could only think of engaging more managers and processes….

Never ended.

I work at small companies now, less money but I enjoy it more. I just fix things and everyone is happy.

The Soviet Union didn't fall, it got merged into Microsoft

[dead]

> I miss the days of simple executables.

One of my "santa's not real" moments of computing was realizing how much static and dynamic libraries fucking suck. This cannot be overstated, and is illustrated perfectly by the heroic efforts of software vendors to get away from them.

Okay, a few functions like fopen are fine - but even those are syscall wrappers IRL. But every OS seems to have concluded, that in the place of API calls, one should rather have streams of text (UNIX) or binary messages (Windows, also a bunch of Linux desktop stuff, like Wayland), or File I/O.

Basically a major motivation behind JIT langauges (C#/.NET certainly) was an effort to get away from dynamically linked libraries,

Even DOS didn't really have libraries, you had peripherals mapped to memory at certain addresses, and a set of interrupts, and that was it.

These single file Go and Rust programs read and write stdio and/or network, which is a reasonable solution to a lot of problems, but certainly not all of them, especially in the interactive space.

Rust and Go can create a single statically linked executable and they are very popular. It could become a thing.

I don't think I'll ever learn what the folder structure on Linux actually means

From what I know about MS, I can understand what they mean. Microsoft famously had teams at odds with each other, so if you "own" something across multiple teams and can't get them to actually work together or take a particular issue seriously, then you just have the shit end of responsibility without the authority to make stuff happen.

There was nothing surprising in that email chain at all, looking at it as someone with lots of experience in large companies.

In a twisted kind of way, the replies were reasonable and logical. They're not dumb, they can see it was crap. No one org can actually own this fix, so in that kind of situation it realistically requires someone like Bill to choose someone to drive it, and demand updates to ensure that everyone gets aligned. Telling his execs, especially in a company so notoriously political and "empire" oriented as it was, isn't going to work.

I actually liked that in Amazon, Jeff Bezos used to send out the infamous "question mark" emails on such a regular basis that they built an exec commitee specifically for the purposes of driving direct action on problems. Didn't matter where you were, or what you were working on, if that question mark email came you dropped everything to work on it.

It's very common. From a certain level up, execs rarely use the products they are responsible for. It's all about strategy, committees, meetings, plans and reports. For them the product is just an abstract thing. When I rented a Buick car, I thought to myself that there is no way any decision maker ever tried the car and thought that this is ok.

I think one of the strengths of Apple during the Jobs days was that Jobs actually sometimes seemed to use the products himself and gave feedback. When I look at the blatant bugs MacOS and iOS had in the last years, I also think that the current Apple big shots never use their stuff or they would have noticed.

> I haven't worked at any companies as large and siloed as Microsoft, but I'd assume this is pretty common for them.

Doesn't need to be that large, I worked for a company that ~4500 employees with about 1000 at HQ, that entire email chain looks exactly like what would ensue every time someone at the C-level flagged an issue.

I suspect the reason is much the same, no one wants to be in the hot seat to fix a problem they have no faith they can fix so everyone plays hot potato with the flaming sack of shit until it bursts and lands on someone.

> Fish begins to stink at the head, not the tail. (13th Century Persian Proverb)