I work for Microsoft
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Got epiphanied.
What started as a very part time thing has turned into something bigger.
I've logged around 17 issues on GitHub on .NET Core stuff over a span of few months.
Issues at first, then steps to repro, screenshots, the whole works. These we're mainly around azure and related deployment CLIs and tooling, the portal breaking, etc.
I've spent over 30 hours give or take basically doing QA for fucking MS.
Now how much money are they saving by letting others do their QA for them? Can someone good with numbers give an estimate?
Shameful practice
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You're fucking shameful. When .NET was closed source, Microsoft got shit for not being open. When they went open source, they get shit for getting issues logged.
If you don't like this model, don't contribute. And stop fucking whining.
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@kt_ Someone hasn't had their Nescafé yet.
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@stillwater said in I work for Microsoft:
.NET Core
Oh, that explains why you have such a bad time with C# and F#. Have you considered switching to .NET Framework 4.7 like a normal person?
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@stillwater said in I work for Microsoft:
Shameful practice
Microsoft benefits, no doubt. But so does everyone else.
Would you rather have a democracy or an absolute dictatorship?
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@Zecc I don't care. When someone says something is ready for production I actually want it production ready. Not deploy something that breaks all the fucking time.
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@kt_ said in I work for Microsoft:
You're fucking shameful. When .NET was closed source, Microsoft got shit for not being open. When they went open source, they get shit for getting issues logged.
If you don't like this model, don't contribute. And stop fucking whining.
I had no problems when things were closed. Shit used to work flawlessly back then.
And I'm not giving them shit for being open. I am giving them shit for not testing stuff they call ready for production.
Also this ain't about contributing. I happily contribute to MS Docs to improve little things here and there. When MS folks push my company use their latest tool and then it trickles down to me, I simply find the stuff does not work as advertised. I cannot explain to my manager I'm playing GitHub with MS folks. They want shit done and so do I. The problem with me doing QA is logging issues and then them getting back to me and a lot of time spent repro-ing issues at their end and it takes forever to get anything done.
I simply do not care about open source. I have to log issues and get them fixed cos my fucking dayjob inloves getting shit done using tools and frameworks written by a company that does fuckall QA.
Also have your nescafe.
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@Gąska We use .NET Core at work. And also the docs are all written for .NET Core for the latest azure stuff like cognitive services. It is a pain to get them working with .NET 4.X and they are depreciating it at a very alarming pace.
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@stillwater said in I work for Microsoft:
When someone says something is ready for production I actually want it production ready. Not deploy something that breaks all the fucking time
That's not something I was talking about. I agree with you on that.
@stillwater said in I work for Microsoft:
And I'm not giving them shit for being open. I am giving them shit for not testing stuff they call ready for production.
Agreed. See also: Windows updates.
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@Zecc said in I work for Microsoft:
Would you rather have a democracy or an absolute dictatorship?
Democracy of course. But it looks like the quality of QA has gone down way too much. If the QA was solid, .NET Core w Azure would be amazing to work with.
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@Zecc said in I work for Microsoft:
Agreed. See also: Windows updates
If there was a good alternate OS I would switch. I don't like Ubuntu or any Linux distros which leaves me with Macs but they're too expensive.
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@stillwater said in I work for Microsoft:
Shameful practice
Shameful? I wish. Everyone thinks it's the best thing ever. Contribute to free software! Collaborative economy! Let's all live in communes.
If Linux can get thousands of hours of work for free, Microsoft would be stupid not to want to get them too.
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@pie_flavor said in I work for Microsoft:
@kt_ Someone hasn't had their Nescafé yet.
I think the problem is that he had his Nescafé
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@stillwater I have found that the more Microsoft embraces "open source," the more the quality and reliability seems to fall. I've been reading sites like Slashdot and TDWTF for nearly 20 years and just never had the sorts of problems people purport to have with MS products. Windows 98, VB6, SQL 2000, SourceSafe, VS 2008, Office XP, MSDN, more or less worked like I expected. The last few years, though, wow, lots of stuff has turned into a barely-documented black box on a forced deprecation/abandonment treadmill dropping features/compatibility left and right because their approach to security is "you don't need to do that so we took it away."
Azure drives me nuts. It all seems to be tied to the latest VS and FU if you're on something else. My department's MS rep couldn't point me to any sort of guide because everything changes too fast for the documentation to keep up (let alone have a book printed). Or you find something like Outlook's object model is half-done and every discussion about it has some "MVP" with a weird name in damage control mode insisting it's half-done by design. The rules wizard has been around since 2002/XP and as of 2016/365 still can't list every type of rule.
Don't even get me started on .NET. I had to read through the 4.0 reference and it's ugly. If that's how bad it looks this many years in and so much stuff is still missing, why should I take Core seriously? What's the purpose other than to drop support for older platforms/hardware? Why don't I just keep using 2.0 with P-Invoke?
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@Zenith said in I work for Microsoft:
Windows 98 ... more or less worked like I expected.
If you expected it to crash multiple times a day, then yes
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@TimeBandit at least blue screens weren't fatal.
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@Gąska said in I work for Microsoft:
@TimeBandit at least blue screens weren't fatal.
If you mean that it didn't kill you, then yes
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@Zenith said in I work for Microsoft:
SourceSafe ... more or less worked like I expected.
Well, if your expectations include repairing corruption once a week.
**shudder**, the memories...
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@TimeBandit That's what I mean. Up until W7 at work broke its Libraries links and VS2008 on W7 at home stopped being able to generate signing keys, the previous issues I had were 3.1 not freeing space after uninstalling a Doom level pack and 98 randomly rearranging my desktop icons. That's it. Compared to the upside-down inside-out fight with getting Android tools or OneDrive/SharePoint to work (and stay working), I love the bad old days of Microsoft.
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@TimeBandit said in I work for Microsoft:
@Gąska said in I work for Microsoft:
@TimeBandit at least blue screens weren't fatal.
If you mean that it didn't kill you, then yes
It didn't kill the OS session either. Unlike this annoying smiley face...
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@dcon I checked files out, worked on them, and checked them back in. Sometimes I looked at version history too. It's probably different when you have 100 people working on the same files at the same time, moving directories around and trampling each other's formatting across multiple branches. That strikes me as a consequence of the "swarm of bees" development model more than a fault of SourceSafe.
Could be why I didn't find TFS to be much of an improvement. When I had to use it for code review, the interface was so primitive that I ended up digging into the SQL views to get what I needed.
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@TimeBandit I'd upvote it, but it just has too many typos for me to do that.
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@topspin Didn't find a better one, sorry
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@TimeBandit sometimes it worked. Sometimes I thought it worked, and that was good enough for six years old me.
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@Gąska said in I work for Microsoft:
Sometimes I thought it worked, and that was good enough for six years old me.
That explains a lot
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@TimeBandit said in I work for Microsoft:
@Gąska said in I work for Microsoft:
Sometimes I thought it worked, and that was good enough for six years old me.
That explains a
lotjokeFTFY
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@Zenith said in I work for Microsoft:
@dcon I checked files out, worked on them, and checked them back in. Sometimes I looked at version history too. It's probably different when you have 100 people working on the same files at the same time, moving directories around and trampling each other's formatting across multiple branches. That strikes me as a consequence of the "swarm of bees" development model more than a fault of SourceSafe.
We had about 10 people. No branches. Because everyone knew "really bad things" happened when you used branches. We locked files on checkout so conflicts weren't a thing. ("Hey, you done with that file yet?") That was back in 1999. We moved to Perforce in about 2001 or 2002 I think. (I was laid off from there in 2008)
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@TimeBandit said in I work for Microsoft:
@Gąska said in I work for Microsoft:
@TimeBandit at least blue screens weren't fatal.
If you mean that it didn't kill you, then yes
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@dcon said in I work for Microsoft:
@Zenith said in I work for Microsoft:
SourceSafe ... more or less worked like I expected.
I read this meme as "wat twat wat".
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@Zenith said in I work for Microsoft:
barely-documented black box on a forced deprecation/abandonment treadmill dropping features/compatibility left and right
Yeah that describes the entirety of what I work with every day.
My most productive times were working on C# with SQL Server on VS 2012 and was churning out features at a very fast pace. Had this gig for a couple years and the kind of things we worried about were always oh shit how do we handle this piece of business logic, how do we handle the other thing, how do we architect the application and nothing ever related to the actual language/framework itself.
With .NET Core there seems to be a lot of battling with the language. I've had hour long discussions with colleagues as to what sort of config file should we use to read from at runtime and what you want to use today sure as fuck gets depreciated tomorrow.
I'm hooked to this because of C# and if I find a better alternative to building web applications with a statically typed language I am jumping ship. I've been giving these folks the benefit of doubt for so much time and I've lost patience. If I go back to AWS, which is a UX nightmare and is a pain to work with, but at least works consistently IMO.
Engineers at MS don't know why certain things in Azure work the way they do. SMH.
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I've been wanting to get an Azure certification, cos it opens a lot of doors, for quite a while now and got all the prep materials ready. I am not so sure anymore.
Oh oh, also they do this incredible thing where a version of an API comes out but with a few bugs, their fix is to release a new version with the bugs fixed but whatever was working in the previous version aslo have their structure changed. So you cannot use the old one cos it's buggy and you have to use the new one but then you gotta make all the changes sigghhh ejeieiwiehhsuwuwiqoalslwllal fuck this.
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Imagine the reason finally give up on .NET is because MS made it open source and the problems we have with it now.
That would make an amazing meme.
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@stillwater said in I work for Microsoft:
If I go back to AWS, which is a UX nightmare and is a pain to work with, but at least works consistently IMO.
AWS is really geared up for being used with some other UI in front, and I believe they must be working from the perspective of “we do the machine-readable API first, and only tack on a low-effort GUI afterwards”. Our experience with it is pretty positive, in that it almost always does exactly what it says it does. Automatability and predictability are what you want most in your foundational components; ain't nobody has time for sitting there, babysitting the cloud.
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@dkf said in I work for Microsoft:
AWS is really geared up for being used with some other UI in front
Are they making a new Portal?
@dkf said in I work for Microsoft:
we do the machine-readable API first, and only tack on a low-effort GUI afterwards”.
Oh yeah they are pretty explicit about it. Every AWS Wizard I know always asks me to learn how to use the CLI tools. I don't have a problem going down that road but too lazy to learn that shit.
Also the Azure UX is much better than the AWS UX(when it works ofc). I've been used to it so much AWS looks like a dumpster fire in contrast.
Leaving UX aside, yes rest of it is pretty solid. You can actually trust it to do what you wanted it to do. The documentation is good but it is fucking vast. Understandable though. The only reason I'm stuck with Azure right now is cos of .NET and Work. I use AWS for all my toy projects and I have zero complaints except the UX fuckery.
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@stillwater said in I work for Microsoft:
I don't have a problem going down that road but too lazy to learn that shit.
Then you're using the tools that don't get a lot of love and attention.
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@stillwater said in I work for Microsoft:
@Zecc I don't care. When someone says something is ready for production I actually want it production ready. Not deploy something that breaks all the fucking time.
You should be able to get your money back.
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@kt_ said in I work for Microsoft:
When .NET was closed source, Microsoft got shit for not being open.
And for customers finding issues that Microsoft should've caught before it ever saw a customer.
When they went open source, they get shit for getting issues logged.
And for customers finding issues that Microsoft should've caught before it ever saw a customer.
If you don't like this model, don't contribute. And stop fucking whining.
Sure, because customers whined about Microsoft shipping buggy shit back when they had to report bugs to Microsoft's telephone support, and now customers whine about Microsoft shipping buggy shit now because they have to document this shit and write it up on Github.
Obviously the customers are the problem. Fucking whiners.
Software is going to have bugs, I realize. And customers are gonna bitch about the bugs that they find. @julianlam actually gets this right occasionally because he tries to fix them and if it's a really embarrassing mistake he sometimes even apologizes, while other forum software developers only begrudgingly fixed things and overall seemed to think that the users and their toxic attitudes were really the problem. Developers and users have to live in this weird, symbiotic relationship where each hates the other but also has to appreciate them or else the whole thing will break down.
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@Zenith said in I work for Microsoft:
@stillwater I have found that the more Microsoft embraces "open source," the more the quality and reliability seems to fall. I've been reading sites like Slashdot and TDWTF for nearly 20 years and just never had the sorts of problems people purport to have with MS products. Windows 98, VB6, SQL 2000, SourceSafe, VS 2008, Office XP, MSDN, more or less worked like I expected. The last few years, though, wow, lots of stuff has turned into a barely-documented black box on a forced deprecation/abandonment treadmill dropping features/compatibility left and right because their approach to security is "you don't need to do that so we took it away."
Azure drives me nuts. It all seems to be tied to the latest VS and FU if you're on something else. My department's MS rep couldn't point me to any sort of guide because everything changes too fast for the documentation to keep up (let alone have a book printed). Or you find something like Outlook's object model is half-done and every discussion about it has some "MVP" with a weird name in damage control mode insisting it's half-done by design. The rules wizard has been around since 2002/XP and as of 2016/365 still can't list every type of rule.
Don't even get me started on .NET. I had to read through the 4.0 reference and it's ugly. If that's how bad it looks this many years in and so much stuff is still missing, why should I take Core seriously? What's the purpose other than to drop support for older platforms/hardware? Why don't I just keep using 2.0 with P-Invoke?
I wonder how much of that has to do with forced porting/rewriting things into whatever is new and shiny (C#?) when half of the people doing it don't understand the old very well or really have the proficiency necessary to make it work correctly in the new.
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@stillwater said in I work for Microsoft:
I had no problems when things were closed. Shit used to work flawlessly back then.
Liar.
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@loopback0 said in I work for Microsoft:
@stillwater said in I work for Microsoft:
I had no problems when things were closed. Shit used to work flawlessly back then.
Liar.
Agreed. I've been using microsoft products since the days of DOS. And I've seen continual improvement in stability and general workability. On average[1], each operating system and version has been an improvement, open source or not. Has it been perfect? No. Nothing ever is. But it's been a general upward slope.
[1] I never used Windows ME or 2000. So I can't say anything about those. But 10 > 8.1 > 8 ~ 7 > Vista > XP > 98 > 95 > 3.1 > DOS in my experience.
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@Benjamin-Hall said in I work for Microsoft:
[1] I never used Windows ME or 2000.
I did. Windows ME was so awful I uninstalled a genuine retail copy of it and reinstalled a pirate copy of 2000.
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I never had much issues with Windows ME, though.
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@Benjamin-Hall said in I work for Microsoft:
@loopback0 said in I work for Microsoft:
@stillwater said in I work for Microsoft:
I had no problems when things were closed. Shit used to work flawlessly back then.
Liar.
Agreed. I've been using microsoft products since the days of DOS. And I've seen continual improvement in stability and general workability. On average[1], each operating system and version has been an improvement, open source or not. Has it been perfect? No. Nothing ever is. But it's been a general upward slope.
[1] I never used Windows ME or 2000. So I can't say anything about those. But 10 > 8.1 > 8 ~ 7 > Vista > XP > 98 > 95 > 3.1 > DOS in my experience.
I'm pretty sure I bought a laptop with Vista and "upgraded" it to XP.
The next Vista laptop was bought just before 7 came out and came with an upgrade to it.
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@Benjamin-Hall said in I work for Microsoft:
I never used Windows ME or 2000.
2000 was great except for that one update that wiped out networking.
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@boomzilla said in I work for Microsoft:
2000 was great except for that one update that wiped out networking.
Things have improved since then
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@AlexMedia said in I work for Microsoft:
I never had much issues with Windows ME, though.
Windows ME was very new and shiny, and it had some excellent new features (plug-and-play compatibility was greatly improved), but ended up being a horrible disaster because:
- like previous versions of Windows, the way it loaded and ran system drivers meant that a poorly-written driver could BSOD the whole system
- but Microsoft also implemented a brand-new driver signing scheme, which was supposed to prevent users from installing unstable drivers
The result was a mad rush for everyone to get their drivers approved and signed so that Windows ME would accept them without complaint. But Windows ME would still allow installation of drivers that weren't signed, though, so some users who needed them just shrugged and told it to install them anyway. Not surprisingly, neither of these things helped with overall driver stability; quite the opposite, in fact. Both the general rush to write and ship compatible drivers, plus the fact that non-compatible drivers were in some cases still installed, contributed to an extremely unstable OS.
If you had no problems with it, consider yourself lucky: you got good drivers. It was very much the luck of the draw.
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@brie wasn't that a big issue with Vista as well? They changed the driver model and hardware manufacturers dithered and didn't change things until too late, then did so poorly? Plus, of course, selling Vista on woefully underpowered hardware, but that's a separate issue.
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@Benjamin-Hall Probably. Vista at least had the benefit of a sandboxed driver model which is less likely to bring down the whole system if a driver shoots craps, though.
