[DaiPlusPlus]

I'm on the Microsoft Blind forum as a former FTE as they don't (yet) revalidate accounts.

MS was amongst the first, or perhaps the first, Blind forum. It started off as a successor to MiniMSFT so people used it to compare comp (salaries, raises, bonuses, stock awards) since then it's massively expanded into other companies all with their own private forums, there are also forums visible to everyone.

The most popular thread in the shared Tech industry forum is "What is your age and base salary?" and it makes for some soul-crushing reading (e.g. late-20s kids at Uber SF with $200k base, $400k stock).

Back on the MS forum, it's usually layoff rumours (one regular poster who comments on layoff rumour threads claims to be in HR), people asking how to get VSA severance, and people complaining about why Skype, OneDrive and SharePoint are so terrible.

[paganel]

> and people complaining about why Skype, OneDrive and SharePoint are so terrible.

I'm glad that people at MS themselves complain about how awful Skype has become. This proves that there are still sane people over there, for a moment I thought that me and my colleagues who still rely on Skype (Slack has never caught on with us) are not paranoid when we complain among ourselves about it.

[DaiPlusPlus]

Pretty much everyone at the IC-level at Microsoft is well-aware of the systemic issues plaguing many products - lower management too - but these issues don't get fixed because of whatever decisions being made at the Director level (mostly of the "evil" kind, like how improving UI responsiveness won't raise profitability but adding video ads will, or how no-one will switch to OneDrive-for-Business simply because the desktop client actually works - it'll be because the sales team drove a hard bargain with an enterprise customer and now their poor users are stuck with it).

I like to think I did my part - I made small UI/UX improvements that I snuck into my official feature work (it all passed peer-review and testing, don't worry) - things like bad margins/padding around controls, something with the wrong color scheme, etc.

[callmeal]

Can you please also fix the "escape key closes chat without any warning" feature too?