[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.