It will get worse, the combined strike of HTML-based "native" UIs, outsourcing and vibe-coding will be too much for any remaining original devs to defend against.
The article left out the most important question: are there any lasting negative consequences for Microsoft due to all these accidents? The answer is likely no. And that's all the the shareholders care about sadly. So this will continue to happen imo. Those Quality Assurance testers won't be coming back any time soon.
Microsoft has gone so deep down the gutter, it is almost unbelievable. I am waiting for the day their profits start taking a hit due to a collective boycott.
A pretty thin opinion piece, I was expecting more details. But there are a bunch of comments under that article which is probably juicier than the main text.
> In 2014, the company decided it could do without many of its testers. Mary Jo Foley reported that "a good chunk" were being laid off. Microsoft didn't need to bother with traditional methods of testing code. Waterfall was out. Agile was in.
An average software dev today is expected to do the work and have the skillset that used to take a half dozen people or more.
There were of course even more roles in the prehistory, but if we think the 2000s, I can count at least: RDB design and management; planning and specification work; interfacing with the customer; testing; merging UI and backend engineering to "full stack"; merging coding, operations and admin to "devops"… I'm pretty sure that the only reason devs aren't yet expected to make their own sales is that the sales department is a profit center and, as such, sacrosanct.
It's simple supply and demand. If the average dev can do that, then that's what will be demanded. If the average dev can't do that, then there's no use demanding it since there's no one to fill that opening (at that price point).
The software dev supply market is absolutely saturated.
I don't think that is real - I don't believe every company was able to afford having DBA, Dev, QA, Business Analysts, Ops etc. as always fully separate FTE.
Only biggest companies were able to have that. If you have a single application to run there is no work for DBA as FTE, in big company where you have multiple projects you can most likely have DBA as a department that handles dozens of databases and running infra. Same with Ops, you can have SRE or OPS doing your infra if you have dozens of applications to run.
Problem is having separate QA/DBA/Dev/Ops departments was breaking because people would "do their stuff" and throw problems over the fence. So everything would go to shit and we have seen it in big companies.
Other thing is - I have read about multiple companies trying "to be professional" burning money on exactly having separate roles, but in reality you cannot simply afford FTE or having full department of DBA or QA or OPS or just Dev - unless you basically are swimming in money.
It's not just their flagship products. It extends to nearly _everything_ they release.
I have a relatively small workforce and office management platform. When MS Places was announced, we thought it was the end. We had a good run, but now one of the big players has entered the market and will wipe out all competition with a single swipe.
Anyway, it sucks. Potential customers who had waited for months tried to use it and immediately sought alternatives. Existing customers who told us they tried to use it and for one reason or another, gave up.
But it seems Microsoft's MO has been 'customer driven testing' for as long as i can remember.
Not just that, but even their game studios. Take for example Starfield. Lots of hype, massive letdown. I'm one of many massive Bethesda fans. Starfield absolutely could have had so much more, but HN knows what happens with software projects. Deadlines aren't met, marketing / business depts start signaling that we need it out the door yesterday, and a bunch of things get cut. I have seen on reddit loads of comments about a ton of content being cut out of Starfield, which is ridiculous, Bethesda games are always content rich.
Microsoft is a giant behemoth, it needs to reorg in a way that allows its very distinct pieces to function correctly. I wish Microsoft would let Bethesda have full autonomy.
Unfortunately the only thing about MS that doesn't suck is their sales prowess. Delivery and quality are optional, but getting companies to use their stack is not.
Hot take but I seriously think both Agile/Scrum and "make a single dev do a ton of things that wouldn't necessarily count as software development" (like RDB design and management) is the direct cause of all of these problems. It is my opinion that Agile/scrum (or, at least, the "agile"/"scrum" that corporations understand) institutionalized the "move fast, break things, consolidate everything into as few positions as possible" mindset, in the name of things like "reducing expenditures" and "ship things really fast and damn the consequences". That includes, oh, I dunno, dumping QA/QC and putting all of that on the end-users. Maybe the real Agile might not do this, but I can't say because, from what I know, very few, if any, corporations actually use the real Agile at all, and instead repurpose the word to mean a completely different system.
Patches have been a mess the last couple years. Makes me think someone or a group of people either quit, were fired, or got pulled into the ai side of the business. The mistakes being made are that of junior programmers without a proper lead or review and testing team. That plus removal of features and addition of too much telemetry into the os and office products.
As one MS Director put it out of frustration: "We do test, a lot. Our testers are called endusers. That's it."
More precisely: He said MSlers get paid by results, achieved Business Value. Testers exist and are called "End Users". Testing is mandatory and part of the core philosophy - they just must do it differently.
Reason: Fear of missing out if moving to slow.
I reminisce the times, where you put in a CD without internet connection. Actual Office is a mess. Thousands of half finished apps, subject to be cancelled anytime. Windows XP's UI was dubbed "glossy" - some of Office's apps UIs are LSD trips for kids. This is ridiculous. Nothing to work with and in no way usable for customer presentations.
Both Microsoft and Apple software quality has go down recently. What is going on. Is it the AI-produced code? It can't be that...
I don't know how are things in Google land; their apps and websites are just-OK; however GMail seems quite stagnant - yeah they slapped LLM on it, cool; but other than that... they added Chat? few years ago? But at least Google's stuff mostly works, even when it's boring.
The auto-translation by LLM on https://learn.microsoft.com/ is horrible. Because it has no idea what is explainer text and what part of the syntax of a command, programming language, class members, ... It translates reserved words that when taken at face value lead to errors. E.g. for https://learn.microsoft.com/de-de/windows-hardware/drivers/d... you get /gerät-aktivieren for what should be /enable-device which must not be translated. For this reason I made a bookmark to switch to English:
javascript: (function() {
var url = window.location.href;
if (url.match(/de-de/gi)) {
window.location.href = url.replace(/de-de/gi, 'en-us');
} else if (url.match(/en-us/gi)) {
window.location.href = url.replace(/en-us/gi, 'de-de');
}
})();
OK, story time. One day at work, I was so fed up with websites automatically translating stuff, I went into my browser's language settings only to find out that I can't remove language preferences altogether, I need to have at least one language set (and I wanted to always have the originals, explicitely not English every time). A team mate came up with a solution: set the language to Latin. I found this a brillant idea: it's a language nobody in their right mind would be using on the web or automatically translate to and if they do, I'll applaud their dedication. So I did exactly that and went on a Latin adventure.
Turns out, the web becomes a more interesting place when you do. First of all, Google apparently makes a logical route from "Latin" to "Rome" to "Italy" to "Italian" and routinely displays login screens and such in Italian. hCaptcha breaks into a thousand pieces and displays (or displayed then) prompts in a broken mess of two to three different languages within one sentence. Several websites wouldn't load at all because they automatically request a translation from their backend server as the first order of business and after a Latin translation returns a 404, they just croak with an empty page.
I've encountered multiple websites actually translated to Latin with a language file, i.e. not live via Google Translate or similar. Probably still an automatic translation, but still I had the chance to applaud them.
But my absolute favourite are Google Maps embeddings. Turns out, every time you visit an embedded Google Maps instance, your account settings don't matter, your location doesn't matter, all that matters is your browser's language -- and Google Maps actually have Latin data for countries and cities! Granted, not for everything, but many many things are translated with Latin names, some of which directly correspond to the Latin names used in centuries past. You can browse the world for hours, sometimes trying to remember which city is behind a Latin name.
Recently the UK bought some old laptops with Win10. I think they handed over to Microsoft +300 million pounds (or within that sum; I don't know how much was attributed to the actual laptops).
I think when you get these deals, you get rich, but you are no longer having any real incentive to do quality control. So the whole system breaks down. They do minimum quality control. Plus, a lot of what Microsoft seems to be doing nowadays is to spy on people. The recall anti-feature kind of gave this away, but before that there was "trusted computing", which I can understand may make sense for some organisations, but for solo users? Why am I being tagged and monitored suddenly? Why is a corporation claiming this is about "trust"? I don't trust that corporation. (I use Linux anyway, but still; one computer has Win10 right now, which I use mostly for testing stuff.)
Quality control for everything sucks now. AI has sucked up the smart developers. iOS 26 has bugs that would have caused Steve Jobs to throw desk ornaments at people.
My recent expierience:
2023: install windows on new machine. Login to microsoft account. Use computer.
2025: install windows on new machine. Try to log in to microsoft account. Cant. Use usb key. I dont have one. Use authenticator. Message is not show in authenticator. Use password. Wrong password (it was 100% the correct one) give up and use offline account. New try to log in: nothing works. In the end i had to reset my password.
46 comments
[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 52.7 ms ] threadAn average software dev today is expected to do the work and have the skillset that used to take a half dozen people or more.
There were of course even more roles in the prehistory, but if we think the 2000s, I can count at least: RDB design and management; planning and specification work; interfacing with the customer; testing; merging UI and backend engineering to "full stack"; merging coding, operations and admin to "devops"… I'm pretty sure that the only reason devs aren't yet expected to make their own sales is that the sales department is a profit center and, as such, sacrosanct.
The software dev supply market is absolutely saturated.
Only biggest companies were able to have that. If you have a single application to run there is no work for DBA as FTE, in big company where you have multiple projects you can most likely have DBA as a department that handles dozens of databases and running infra. Same with Ops, you can have SRE or OPS doing your infra if you have dozens of applications to run.
Problem is having separate QA/DBA/Dev/Ops departments was breaking because people would "do their stuff" and throw problems over the fence. So everything would go to shit and we have seen it in big companies.
Other thing is - I have read about multiple companies trying "to be professional" burning money on exactly having separate roles, but in reality you cannot simply afford FTE or having full department of DBA or QA or OPS or just Dev - unless you basically are swimming in money.
I have a relatively small workforce and office management platform. When MS Places was announced, we thought it was the end. We had a good run, but now one of the big players has entered the market and will wipe out all competition with a single swipe.
Anyway, it sucks. Potential customers who had waited for months tried to use it and immediately sought alternatives. Existing customers who told us they tried to use it and for one reason or another, gave up.
But it seems Microsoft's MO has been 'customer driven testing' for as long as i can remember.
Microsoft is a giant behemoth, it needs to reorg in a way that allows its very distinct pieces to function correctly. I wish Microsoft would let Bethesda have full autonomy.
Is that legendary QC in the room with us right now?
[1] https://www.theregister.com/2018/04/20/windows_98_comdex_bso...
I have been Microsoft-adjacent for 30 years, and at no point in that time have I been aware of Microsoft having a reputation for "quality".
More precisely: He said MSlers get paid by results, achieved Business Value. Testers exist and are called "End Users". Testing is mandatory and part of the core philosophy - they just must do it differently.
Reason: Fear of missing out if moving to slow.
I reminisce the times, where you put in a CD without internet connection. Actual Office is a mess. Thousands of half finished apps, subject to be cancelled anytime. Windows XP's UI was dubbed "glossy" - some of Office's apps UIs are LSD trips for kids. This is ridiculous. Nothing to work with and in no way usable for customer presentations.
I don't know how are things in Google land; their apps and websites are just-OK; however GMail seems quite stagnant - yeah they slapped LLM on it, cool; but other than that... they added Chat? few years ago? But at least Google's stuff mostly works, even when it's boring.
Turns out, the web becomes a more interesting place when you do. First of all, Google apparently makes a logical route from "Latin" to "Rome" to "Italy" to "Italian" and routinely displays login screens and such in Italian. hCaptcha breaks into a thousand pieces and displays (or displayed then) prompts in a broken mess of two to three different languages within one sentence. Several websites wouldn't load at all because they automatically request a translation from their backend server as the first order of business and after a Latin translation returns a 404, they just croak with an empty page.
I've encountered multiple websites actually translated to Latin with a language file, i.e. not live via Google Translate or similar. Probably still an automatic translation, but still I had the chance to applaud them.
But my absolute favourite are Google Maps embeddings. Turns out, every time you visit an embedded Google Maps instance, your account settings don't matter, your location doesn't matter, all that matters is your browser's language -- and Google Maps actually have Latin data for countries and cities! Granted, not for everything, but many many things are translated with Latin names, some of which directly correspond to the Latin names used in centuries past. You can browse the world for hours, sometimes trying to remember which city is behind a Latin name.
I think when you get these deals, you get rich, but you are no longer having any real incentive to do quality control. So the whole system breaks down. They do minimum quality control. Plus, a lot of what Microsoft seems to be doing nowadays is to spy on people. The recall anti-feature kind of gave this away, but before that there was "trusted computing", which I can understand may make sense for some organisations, but for solo users? Why am I being tagged and monitored suddenly? Why is a corporation claiming this is about "trust"? I don't trust that corporation. (I use Linux anyway, but still; one computer has Win10 right now, which I use mostly for testing stuff.)
2025: install windows on new machine. Try to log in to microsoft account. Cant. Use usb key. I dont have one. Use authenticator. Message is not show in authenticator. Use password. Wrong password (it was 100% the correct one) give up and use offline account. New try to log in: nothing works. In the end i had to reset my password.