[Grimblewald]

I don't have the opportunities you're talking about. You misunderstand who I am or what my background is. I don't come from the USA and in fact you literally couldn't pay me to go work in or for the USA. Not in my entire life has that ever been possible. USA has always been a last resort option for me. Not that I have the option, but to even consider it, it would need to be the last option left.

I'm not saying that you cannot work in an MS-shop. I am just saying that the attitudes I see reflected in the comments supporting MS-shops explain why MS-shop output looks the way it does.

Ultimately, it comes down to company culture not individual developers. I wouldn't hold devs accountable for what is a systemic issue, in fact I am grateful there are those devs who don't care about taking pride in their work who can survive in an MS-shop without it draining their reason for being. If not for them, positions in places where taking pride in your work doesn't come at personal cost would be far more competitive.

However, that doesn't mean it isn't worth calling out an emerging pattern of MS-shops being the kind of place incompatible with wanting to take pride in your work.

[janderson215]

I’m an American living in the US. Worked at a startup acquired by a very large enterprise and I very much appreciate your attitude over the parent’s comments. I find it incredibly demoralizing that so many people feel the way they do and appreciate those who work for more than a paycheck. I quit my job (thankfully I was in a position that I was able to) because of this attitude being so prevalent.

You want to provide value to your customers and anything getting in the way of that should be a frustration, not something we just accept. Stagnation will lead to decline that is very difficult to reverse. I don’t know what you do, but thank you for your perspective and disposition and for admonishing the above attitude.

[jack_tripper]

> I quit my job (thankfully I was in a position that I was able to)

What about those who are not able to? Because your argument falls flat on tis face once if you remove that part.

[janderson215]

I do not disregard it, but I have no idea what to do about it and it gives me an existential concern about the future of the world with which I am familiar (America? The West?). I don’t think it is a healthy society if the people responsible for systems (critical, luxury, or otherwise) do not care about succession or improvement of the systems they build or maintain. Best case scenario, the problem the systems solve fail and someone else sees value in solving the problem, so they solve it again and re-discover the “why”. My guess is that the longer it takes for the failures to happen, the longer it will take to re-learn the “why”.

I don’t like that people just work for a paycheck. I understand why and it’s very hard to argue against people doing it and not caring when their managers or the companies they work for don’t care about them in return. The Cambrian Explosion of solved problems will lead to an deluge of catastrophes when a large percentage of those systems fail unless people take care to transmit the “why” to the future stewards of these systems.

[Grimblewald]

That's a great point. I can be less diligant in my documentation than i'd like to be at times. This means somethimes the "why" of something isnt discussed. I need to stop doing that and find a way to add all the "whys" without overwhelming readers who just want answers. Maybe footnotes or appendicies.

[janderson215]

While I appreciate the effort and strive to do so myself, I’m not sure this is entirely a matter of you trying harder/doing better. You can often explain the context well enough to a degree that is practical enough to solve the narrow case, but communication is lossy by nature, so descriptions of systems become impoverished. It is so hard not to make bad assumptions about the reader, especially if you look forward even 1 or 2 generations from now. It seems this is a large part of the role of the US Supreme Court and I’m certain that is not perfect even with days of deliberation. For technically enforced systems with faster feedback loops, higher volumes, and lower tolerances, there are necessarily more errors.

[jack_tripper]

> I don't come from the USA and in fact you literally couldn't pay me to go work in or for the USA.

That's why I also said "international tech hubs" because that's were it's easier to find non-MS jobs outside the US. But it seems that passed over your head and you spent 3 sentences to go on a tangent on how much you hate the US even if the US wasn't my point.

>an emerging pattern of MS-shops being the kind of place incompatible with wanting to take pride in your work

There's plenty of non MS-shops that make SW just as bad, if not much more worse and evil than MS-shops (nefarious Facebook and Google spy-/ad-ware isn't done in a Microsoft shop). SW stack is just a tool and a tool does not define one's character just how whether you use DeWalt or Makita doesn't. Which is why I dislike your binary/black-or-white view on this topic as it screams ideological zealotry, short sightedness or even borderline discriminatory.

Taking "pride in your work" in the context of working for someone else's SW corporation, is mostly a luxury belief of privileged people who have the luxury of choice in the labor market, while for most folk, labor is done just as a way to pay bills, while taking pride is reserved for activities with hobbies, family, children and friends.

You don't need to "take pride in your work" to be a kind person and functioning member of society, but it seems it's just a virtue signaling purity test by the "holier than though" crowd of tech workers.