[binarycheese]

"I disagree. I think they have a wealth of talented engineers."

That statement is false in many ways. As a developer, you keep seeing substandard products from Microsoft. Have you looked at the architecture of SharePoint? compare SqlServer CE to SQLite, not to mention the horrible tutorials and source code which Microsoft keeps putting out.

C#/.NET is an excellent platform/language but Microsoft keeps putting out horrible sub standard code/tutorials

[vonmoltke]

Your first two paragraphs are not mutually exclusive. My former employer had a wealth of talented engineers who were overridden or ignored on key architecture decisions, either by semi-technical upper management or customers. Things had to be done a certain way because X wants them done that way, and by the time the bad decisions get highlighted the technical debt is too high for management to justify changing direction, and the program is forced to limp along with the crap they have.

My impression of Microsoft (entirely from the outside) is that they have this same problem.

[keithnoizu]

It's a mix. I've seen some brilliant engineers here but I've seen a lot of so-so employees collecting pay checks. What I do think is very real issue and more so than the stack ranking is that we are incredibly date sensitive here and cost sensitive. I often feel, in my personal opinion, that improvements or changes that could make us better off 13 months down the road are culled or punted because the upfront cost is too high or because set commitments for an upcoming timeline.

[aswanson]

What is the point of having all those billions in cash on hand, and an R & D budget exceeding the market cap of many DJIA participants, if you're going to penny pinch where it counts? http://finance.yahoo.com/q/ks?s=msft What timeline is so important (short term) if you lose the future, period?

[flyinRyan]

Look at Sharepoint's history. It's a Frankenstein of a bunch of acquired products. None of the built in services were enterprise ready last I checked (e.g. an alarm that doesn't always fire, a file upload service that doesn't always upload, etc., etc.).

[scott_s]

In a large company, the technical documentation may be scrubbed by non-engineers.

[dr42]

Have you seen the sales of SharePoint?

Engineers always think that companies are engineering driven, when in fact mostly they are sales driven. If SharePoint sells well, then its not substandard, even if you don't like its architecture.

[flyinRyan]

Sales? I thought it was just a free add on?