There’s a reason why despite investing so much in building AI tools, MSFT has a bad rep and no one uses their tools. People use CC, Codex, Cursor when MSFT already has supposedly competitive tools.

Note: I work at MSFT.

Lot of these companies are bloated from having way too many Engineers anyway. Once you have mature software that brings in bagfuls of money, you don’t need that many people to keep the ship steady. I have seen this first hand at MSFT, we started a new team back in 2019 and it probably had ~40 people full time across US and India. By 2024 when I left, we had about 20 people in India who could easily run the service, the US team was dissolved and they moved to other teams in MSFT. The fact was that new features were few and the team was in KTLO mode. I have seen the reverse happen too, the team I was working on was dissolved and we were moved to different teams and everything moved to the US last year, managers were converted to ICs and a few folks were probably fired but it was a ~10 year old service that didn’t need that many people to run, even more so after AI tools became big last year.

I will give his other works a read. I tried reading Crash multiple times but it was a bit too gory for me.

Brave of the developer to bring it up. This cult of personality is pervasive throughout the tech industry.

I finished the assignments in that course and that covers all the important aspects like processes, context switching, CPU modes, page tables and virtual memory and many other relevant topics like file systems, device drivers etc. And also it’s free.

From the table of contents this course gets too involved in ancillary matters like bootloaders or the Rust language itself whereas the focus of any OS development tutorial should be on core concepts like how processes are implemented, how context switching works, how paging and consequently multi level page tables (actually, in code) work etc.

I do have some burning questions though, 1. How are they saving their work to the cloud if they use LibreOffice ? I don’t think it offers the same functionality that M365 suite does. 2. How are they handling IT security? Are they using a different vendor ?

I cancelled my Netflix subscription 7 years ago, 99% of their content is algorithmic drivel. Mindhunter, Dahmer, House of Cards were something I liked but nothing beyond that. I knew they were trash once I saw the sheer number of spinoffs they have just on Pablo Escobar. They had had one decent run of Narcos but then they just tried to extract every drop of juice out of that one persona. Most of Netflix dramas are just the equivalent of abhorrent and ugly graffiti. Their shows are Exhibit A in what happens if you give into algorithmic drivel and have no human touch to curate them.

HBO has some timeless TV classics that I keep rewatching every year even though I have watched them multiple times. Netflix can’t produce TV dramas like that, ain’t in their blood. Completely different DNAs.

Netflix does deserve all the plaudits wrt to their streaming experience though.

In my L480, I opened the laptop to change the battery and also install more RAM. Even for a hardware neophyte such as myself , this was straightforward.

Thinkpads are modular, you can easily get the components such as a battery etc. My T14s comes with a 3-year warranty as well.

Coming to my previous laptop which I still have with me, I bought a Thinkpad L480 in 2018. It was then a dirt cheap version of a Thinkpad. But it did the job with no complaints. I had to replace the battery after 4 years but that wasn’t an issue. It did everything a daily driver is supposed to do, reliable and never threw a fit. I only had to change it as I felt I needed a better screen and performance. The Intel processor was showing its age.

I have only minor complaints running Thinkpad with Ubuntu. But if you start moving away from popular distros, then you have to accept you will occasionally have to tinker to get things work.

What in god’s name is the “voluntary exit program” going to do then ? It will obviously eliminate some roles ?

Corporate doublespeak at its finest.

It’s also the same reason why MSFT doesn’t have a blockbuster AI product.

1. At work or for personal use, I use GPT-5 or Claude Code. I am forced to use Copilot because that has access to internal company data but it’s nowhere close to GPT-5 or Claude.

2. MSFT open sourced VS code but on its own couldn’t engineer products like Cursor or Windsurf. Lets leave aside the economics of these products for now.

The regular down in the trenches engineer like myself is so busy thinking about how I can advance my career by playing political games, currying favour with my manager or manager’s manager that little time gets spent on product building.

Good thing MSFT has all the cash in the world to invest in companies like OAI, GitHub etc because the bureaucracy is stifling at MSFT.

The good folks at MIT were gracious enough to make it available for free, free as in free beer.

I did this course over ~3 months and learnt immeasurably more than reading any blog, tutorials or textbook. There’s broad coverage of topics like virtual memory, trap processing, how device drivers work (high-level) etc that are core to any modern OS.

Most of all, you get feedback about your implementations in the form of tests which can help guide you if you have a working or effective solution.

10/10 highly recommended.

Most of these efforts have questionable returns and most projects will usually involve increasing test coverage or categorising customer incidents for better triage, apart from these low hanging fruits not much comes out of it.

People still play the visibility game though. Hey, look at what we did using LLMs. That’s so cool, now where’s my promotion? Business outcomes wise, there’s some low hanging fruits that have been plucked but otherwise it doesn’t live up to the hype.

Personally for me, it is helpful in a few scenarios,

1. Much better search interface than traditional search engines. If I want to ramp up on some new technology or product, it gives me a good broad overview and references to dive deep. No more 10 blue links.

2. Better autocomplete than before but it’s still not as groundbreaking as AI hype hucksters make it out to be

3. If I want to learn some concepts (say how ext4 FS works), it can give a good breakdown of the high level concepts and then I go need to study and come back with more Q’s. This is the only genuine use case that I really like. Where I can iteratively ask Q’s to clarify and cement my understanding of a concept. I have used Claude code and ChatGPT for this and I can barely see any difference between the two.

This is my balanced take.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44794374

Points: 4

# Comments: 0

I have seen engineering teams at MSFT that provide questionable value to the business so trimming the fat does make sense. Also These multiple rounds of layoffs have made me internalise that we need to be working on something valuable instead of useful.

Can someone discern why these layoffs are being done ? Driven by large shareholders? More runway till we get revenue from GenAI while we keep burning money on GPUs ?

We have come a long way now that we have these advanced classifiers. You would be surprised how low tech the initial product was, by low tech I mean devoid of any ML/AI. We went GA in end of 2019.

Saw a lot of interesting use cases too for e.g Japanese enterprises wanting to detect cases like suicide or intent to suicide, that is why we have multiple types of classifiers.

I worked on the Infra side (not ML). That too was “low-tech” or the more apt term would be “not the latest tech”. Core parts of the app were part of a monolith (think Exchange). Then we were using a really old .NET Framework version for our MVC app. Lot of the storage technologies we used were very MS specific as well. AFAIK, all of this is still valid today.