[cjbgkagh]

Former MSFTy, don’t bother wasting your time giving feedback. Nobody cares, those that cared left. Microsoft has a weird culture, very top down, very passive aggressive between departments. For a brief while I would diligently prepare bugs for the dog food software. I would even walk over to visit people responsible for it and chat about it. Even for software where ‘zero bugs’ was important they’d just delete a whole bunch of bugs and see if any bounce (come back). Eventually people get sick of refilling so they get to zero bug bounce by exhausting the very people trying to help them.

Enough social media pressure may end up risking a line item in a PMs yearly goals. So that might get looked at.

Even the some of the most backward laggards (e.g. government departments) are sick to death of Microsoft and have long been introducing policies that all new software has to be web only.

Those pointing to Azure as the future should known that they have very aggressive sales who often vastly oversell to customers. Customers aren’t renewing at the same level. Plus I don’t see them being able to compete with Amazon long term. You can only buy Skype for the bundled government customer so many times.

[WhyNotHugo]

> Even for software where ‘zero bugs’ was important they’d just delete a whole bunch of bugs and see if any bounce (come back). Eventually people get sick of refilling so they get to zero but bounce by exhausting the very people eying time help them.

The open-source equivalent of this behaviour is "stale bots" that close or lock issues with no activity. Or "moving discussion to a separate tracker", with all bugs getting closed and a polite request to re-open them. Or a "locking bugs older than X months, please open a new one if still applicable".

Sure, opening it again isn't a big deal. Re-opening all bugs ever opened by all humans is just pointless work for no obvious benefit.

Having zero open issues should never be a goal, any mature project has open issues. Trying to reach zero is chasing a number that won't make a product better; it's just a number.

[cjbgkagh]

Those bots drive me insane; it punishes the most helpful the most. I would much rather they leave it open. I often find myself digging around closed issues to find people with similar problems.

[notreallyserio]

My favorite thing about stalebots: using the reaction emojis doesn't count (afaict) so me-tooing is encouraged.

[Sebb767]

Until some maintainer writes "Please stop replying with +1 etc, we know the issue. Use reaction emojis instead.". Bonus points if the issue also gets limited to contributors only.

[howdydoo]

Has anyone made a bot yet to automatically reply to stalebot so issues aren't closed?

[EMM_386]

> Has anyone made a bot yet to automatically reply to stalebot so issues aren't closed?

stalebots serve a purpose but they can be extremely annoying also.

I literally have 10+ issues bookmarked on Github I have to keep responding on to prevent the stalebots from wiping the issue out.

They are all issues affecting my software, and I don't want them closed by a bot just because nobody has gotten around to fixing them.

Maybe I should just go in there and submit a PR, if only I could find the time.

[KindDragon]

Agree, but forever open issues doesn’t give any value too. Because you don’t know if this issue still applicable for latest version of app/library. I think stalled issue should be closed, especially minor one.

[gkop]

It’s the opposite. The older the bug, the less likely it will be fixed. Those old bugs are one of the most reliable sources of information how the software behaves.

[k8sToGo]

There is a huge difference between forever and 7 days of inactivity.

[cjbgkagh]

Especially when it’s the developer that is inactive. Like, we’ve ignored you for 7 days and now we have committed to ignoring you forever. If I find this I won’t even bother filing a report. I get that we’re not owed attention, but they’re not owed bug reports. As a dev I have won’t fixed issues due to lack of dev time. I think the problem is when it’s paid software, or an open source project connected to paid software. There seems to be a push of testing onto the users which is disastrous when combined with a policy of ignoring them. Microsoft went through a period of aiming for two testers for each dev. Post my tenure it seems that devs are supposed to the test themselves.

[zitterbewegung]

I would rather have a bug report basically ignored than actually modified. There is a big difference between ignored and modified because it speaks to not only we are going to ignore this but no one will respect the content of the forum.

I remember when an admin for reddit changed a bunch of comments and it was controversial when he did it an they introduced a policy that would disallow engineers to have that kind of access to the database [1]

[cjbgkagh]

Totally agree, beyond the pale. My experience predates the Feedback Hub, but I’ve only heard it has gotten worse after my tenure. I assume bugs would still get copied into a separate internal bug tracking which has an edit history. I assume it was an overzealous contractor with a cultural misunderstanding.

[teddyh]

> Microsoft has a weird culture, […] very passive aggressive between departments.

https://bonkersworld.net/organizational-charts

[phillipcarter]

> Former MSFTy, don’t bother wasting your time giving feedback. Nobody cares, those that cared left.

What you're describing does not comport with my experience there.

Personally, I ensured that every issue filed on GitHub was triaged (read, replied if necessary, de-duped if necessary, labeled appropriately, assigned a severity/priority) and that all feedback items from the Visual Studio feedback system that applied to my product area was either (a) de-duped to GitHub and given the same treatment, or (b) dealt with in that system because it might have had some info that could constitute private data being leaked (sometimes I'd create a representative issue on GitHub and de-dupe to that one if appropriate).

What I'm describing is actually routine for most PMs and engineers in the group I was in, and that's still the case today. I won't claim that it's perfect or that everyone who files an issue will have their bugs dealt with immediately, but I've had several community members give positive feedback about the whole thing and talk about how it's like night and day compared to previous eras at the company.

> Even for software where ‘zero bugs’ was important they’d just delete a whole bunch of bugs and see if any bounce (come back). Eventually people get sick of refilling so they get to zero but bounce by exhausting the very people eying time help them.

This is ridiculous and I sincerely hope it's not happening outside of small groups (who should stop right now). I never saw this happen. We'd deprecate some older things and then close associated bugs as not applicable, but declaring bankruptcy on a bunch of legit bugs would be unheard of in the group I worked with. If you were caught doing that you'd be in some deep shit, since it's a violation of the trust your community places in you to be a responsible caretaker of the software they rely on.

> Enough social media pressure may end up risking a line item in a PMs yearly goals.

Social media pressure is a thing, sadly, but also not that much of a thing. Only in rare cases did something exploding on twitter or whatever cause action on our end. I'm also curious where in Microsoft a single PM's line items are treated with that much relative importance. This whole notion of "PMs dictate and devs make it happen" is bizarre to me because figuring out what to do next was always a collaboration and careful evaluation of tradeoffs across both disciplines. Again, it wasn't perfect and there's much I wish was different, but fundamentally it was sound and constructive. Any of my line items as a PM wouldn't somehow get re-prioritized just because someone yelled about it on social media.

Anyways, I'm sorry you had a bad time with what seems like it may have been a bad group. If what you're saying is true, I hope that changes for the group you were with.

[cjbgkagh]

Hi Phillip, you are a very unusual PM in a very unusual group that is able to derive a lot of value from user feedback who are usually very technical experts. I'm not sure how much your personal experience generalizes. Same could be said for my experience I guess so that is a fair point. I definitely had a bad time at a bad group. In the Steves era there were a lot of bad groups. I predate your tenure by quite a bit but I do keep in touch with former colleagues and exert soft influence to get the things I need built. I also think there is a selection criteria bias on the type of PM to be on HackerNews. Why does it happen to be you posting here out of such a large company. Also I thought you left - I would have counted you as one of the ones who cared leaving? I know others who also care haven't left but I think it's safe to say that on average they care less. You will be missed. You also started at MSFT right? I think you're taking things from Microsoft on face value that perhaps you shouldn't be.

[phillipcarter]

Eh, not too unusual! Not everyone is the same, but the care factor is high for my previous peers, most of whom are still there. I can also appreciate that for consumer tech things are different. There is a higher degree of "it just needs to work" because it's unlikely the average user can articulate what's wrong, and they shouldn't need to anyways.

One thing I'll say is that it really does feel like the worst decisions about software there were made during the Steve Ballmer era. In my case, trying to keep compatibility with absolutely insane software behavior where it tries to do way more than it reasonably should made up the bulk of my toil and issues customers had.

A former coworker described to me that it was a very different time then. People believed they were the best engineers in the world, building software nobody else could make. In some small cases maybe that was true, but generally it was not. The combination of arrogance and willingness to try to bolt on as many capabilities and unbound extensibility features as possible led to a severe problem for people (sometimes the same people!) later on in life. It's actually been cool seeing how that complexity was methodically tamed. But it also makes me fear for any future company where a similar level of arrogance is practiced.

[cjbgkagh]

Again, you were in a very unusual group. I agree you have peers that do care a lot, my statement was hyperbole, I didn't literally mean that no-one cares. One must also weigh the caring by those with the ability to effect change. Microsoft is still a very top down org so you have to look a Julia Liuson and Scott Guthrie to get an idea of what will happen. AFAIK both of them respect Don Syme enough to provide political coverage for you and your colleagues so that you all could focus more on your jobs instead of office politics. But I feel that neither will fund F# enough to unleash it's potential. Visual Studio has stupid F# bugs and AFAIK they won't get fixed. And really, leaning on the constantly breaking 3rd party open source plugin Ionide for F# VS Code support. I know people on the F# team (again an unusual team) care about it but Microsoft as an org doesn't care enough. And not to mention the dogs breakfast that is Win11.

[rishav_sharan]

This is my experience as well. I am a PM in Edge team and we take user feedback in our app extremely seriously. There are entire teams which parse the user feedback and add bugs for them. All top feedback is expected to be fixed under a specific SLA and these metrics are often tracked at leadership level.

In fact, for a lot of feature teams fixing the top user feedback issues is often part of their OKRs.

So yeah, I don't know if there are groups in MS which really don't consider their users' feedback, but from what I know that isn't the common behavior.

MS has its faults - every megacorp will have its own share of warts, but this specific one, i am not sure I can believe.

[zaat]

Excuse me for the (unusually for me) negative attitude and ranting, but I for one would never even think about posting feedback to edge as it so aggressively user-hostile that I would never believe UX matter at all to anyone on board. Even the most common use case - downloading chrome - is a painful experience, which the browser serving you with tears all the way. Opening edge for the first time throws chain of undesired bold messages and then the NSFW msn.com.

Sometimes I have to open edge on multiple costumer servers, with new user profile in each of them and with no customization of the defaults in place. Terrible experience, multiple clicks to do what you came for in the first place, and then again serving you the delightful and stylish MSN homepage,

[niuzeta]

As someone _making_ those user feedbacks as an employee of MSFT, I've never felt heard nor taken seriously. Apathy from users is unfortunately earned by experiences. I'm glad your experiences have been better, and don't mean to generalize my experiences. I am however providing another datapoint.

[pantalaimon]

I guess the difference is that Microsoft actually has to compete for people to use Edge, whereas other products people are just forced to use by their employer like that dumpster fire that is Teams.

[jimbobimbo]

Issues filed on GitHub != process that goes through the Windows Feedback Hub. The latter is a completely opaque process and product team engagement varies wildly from feature area to feature area.

[vidanay]

It appears that you are speaking in the past tense and therefore fit in the category of "those that cared left".

[phillipcarter]

Perhaps I didn't make it clear, but "those that care" are mostly still there.

[julianz]

Not my experience, I reported a typo in a minor Git sub-dialog in VS, and it was triaged, fixed and released in VS2022. Happy days!

[theturtletalks]

VS Code and GitHub will hard carry Azure if need be

[azemetre]

Shouldn't that be the other way around? What good is it for a company if the only products people end up using are the ones given for free?

I'm sure other software companies faced similar fates (no one paying for services, only using freely available services) but I can't think of any ATM.

[theturtletalks]

I’m thinking vertical integration where you write your code on VS, host it and collaborate on GitHub, and deploy to Azure. I always thought GitHub was a hedge for Azure against the other cloud providers.

[WhyNotHugo]

> What good is it for a company if the only products people end up using are the ones given for free?

I think Facebook helps answer that question a bit: just because someone is a user doesn't mean they're not the product.

Giving out one product if it helps other ulterior motives is still profit. Vertical integration also plays a part in this. Especially if the paid product re-invents something in a non-standard way, and then the free product only supports than.

[azemetre]

That's fair but I thought we were talking about in the sense of software companies? Facebook makes a large majority of their money through advertising, not the amount of installs they get from pytorch or react.

What sort of advertising can you honestly inject into something like VS Code to keep users from leaving?

I do agree about vertical integration, another user mentioned using VS Code and Github as a means to introduce Azure. That makes more sense to me and I neglected the thought.

[cjbgkagh]

Azure is vastly bigger than VS Code and GitHub. In my opinion the monetization needed for a hard carry would risk their popularity. There is potential for interesting synergies but there has always been potential, just ask Ray Ozzie how that went.

[whydid]

Given enough time, they all will rot.

[_8j50]

They don't need to compete with amazon they just need to be profitable. Their AAD integrations are nice and their portal+ux(including api+powershell) and Defender ATP for E5 customers make them much better than GCP and in some cases AWS. The big three are here to stay.

[cjbgkagh]

They need large amounts of exponential growth, it’s baked into their current value which they need to justify their investments. Microsoft has reoriented itself around Azure and if Azure was merely just profitable Microsoft would have to jettison a lot of what they do. Without another money printer it would be a blood bath.

I think that like Auditing companies there might be a bit of a rotation, or risk spreading among the big providers. Maybe it could help get a discount from Amazon if you could show that you could move to Azure for a little while.

My main worry that their sales will run out of wealthy suckers, and efficiency gains from CPUs may slow down a bit in time.

[_8j50]

My point was Azure can't compete with aws on small/medium size orgs but for large corps who can afford E5 and more it has tremenduous value. Existing windows IT likes azure better. Their main income as a company is still licenses and support which extends to Azure.

[cjbgkagh]

Their prices are targeted towards large corps, I think that by leaving room at the small/medium orgs you're allowing competition to improve to a point where they will go after your large corp customers as well. It also becomes difficult to lower prices because you'd lose more from your existing customers than you'd gain from new customers, so you kind of get stuck at a high price point and slowly bleed out customers who are on the margins. You can make lots of the money in the process and doing this could be a perfectly legitimate strategy. The value adds may be enough to prevent this. I don't know. My datapoint was that it seemed that initial purchases were based on vast overestimates of provisioning and renewals tend to come with significant reductions. This is something that can stay hidden during a period of high grown where there is a lot of onboarding but I would expect to show up in the numbers quite quickly if growth slows with a ~3 year lag.