[jiggawatts]

> integration tests of any kind

No!

Microsoft famously fired their entire QA team. Also… their technical writing team. And then they outsourced both support and the bulk of their development to India.

You get what you pay for, and right now Microsoft is variously paying either zero or very little.

[makeitdouble]

I'd see Microsoft hiring contractors, but do they outsource product development to external companies ?

[jiggawatts]

Not sure about development, but Azure support is almost entire outsourced.

[wkat4242]

It's double outsourced even. They outsource to Accenture who then outsources it to small companies.

It's really really annoying because these people get penalised for escalating and they don't know much more than what it says in the docs. I read those before contacting them and it's always a hassle to get my case through to real support. They'll stall forever asking for more logs and more tests. I feel like I'm on trial defending that I really have a problem. Not a valued customer.

And mind you, this is already meant to be the "premium" support tier.

[makeitdouble]

At this point I think it's par for the course. There must be some support tiers where you'll get actual Microsoft employees deal with your issues (I don't think Apple's devs get a random contractor reading a script when they report server issues), but short of that I would feel lucky to even get a human to look at the question.