[stickfigure]

Microsoft is forcing the company to dogfood their own tools. They do this because they need the feedback so they can improve their tools, and they think these tools are a critical part of their future.

Presumably your new company isn't building AI tools, so they don't care what you use.

Imagine a developer in 1990s Microsoft saying "I want to use Borland C++ because it's better than the Microsoft IDE". Maybe it is, maybe it isn't, but that's not the point.

[sedawk]

This is true, but is effective only if the dogfooders' feedback is accepted and worked upon. Which is not the case, I can tell you this from first-hand experience (currently work at Msft). Also unleashing and forcing tech savvy people to use immature tools is only asking for trouble when you don't have allocated enough manpower to deal with the fallout (that is, incessant downpour of improvement feedback). One cannot just force engineers to dogfood tools and then ignore them. This is precisely like Win-8 era mania, only this time it's infecting the whole company not just single org!

[taurath]

Not only are you discouraged from criticizing half baked manager-metric led implementations, you’re deeply incentivized to openly praise it if you want to be considered for the next well-funded initiative.

People with fiefdoms don’t like criticism. Microsoft pays their vassal dependent companies to use their products, no users actually like or would choose the products (Teams? 365 copilot? Azure?), and the whole enclosed ecosystem is pretty awful.

[soco]

Count me as that weird user that would choose Azure any second over AWS. The integration and interface stability they offer is simply better. Teams sucks indeed, but as I don't know any less-suck alternative I'll have to trust you, and the with Copilot I never bothered much so again can't tell.

[sedawk]

> ...deeply incentivized to openly praise... Sadly, you're not far off from describing the reality in many cases!

[mlavrent]

They do actually build internal tooling! They key is that it’s actually good enough that feedback to the limited, targeted, and quickly actionable. Microsoft’s internal was immature enough that the general feedback you’d always have is “this is unusable”, which is something the teams building the tools could probably figure out themselves before making the whole company spend time beta testing the tools.

The main point is that the tools need to be of a certain quality/maturity for dogfooding to be effective.

[capr]

Maybe if they would've let their engineers use Borland C++ they would've learned a thing or two for their own product.

[pjmlp]

I keep telling to the WinUI marketing team that instead of talking about how "great" doing XAML C++ is, they should actually buy a copy of C++ Builder.

[roncesvalles]

Microsoft either doesn't care about feedback or doesn't have the engineering ability to act on them, otherwise Visual Studio and Microsoft Teams wouldn't be such terrible pieces of software despite tens of thousands of Microsoft employees using them daily.

[pjmlp]

In 2025, C++ Builder is still better than Visual C++, in what concerns doing Windows GUI development in C++, some things never change, and management keeps being blind to them.

Regarding dog fooding, Project Reunion was also a victim of all engines AI, now the damage is done and only the Windows team cares, because their job depends on using it.

[vkou]

Look, if you want the people to dig trenches with spoons, you can expect them to do it. But if all you're giving them is spoons, you're going to need to give them a lot of slack on the expected digging schedules.

Being forced to use a shit tool because <some other department somewhere in the company wants your feedback>, while your deadlines haven't been adjusted for all this wasted time is not acceptable behaviour. It's the kind of authoritarian horseshit that's that's so often pushed by unproductive parasites onto people who do actual work.

[OhMeadhbh]

Dogfooding is great and all, but if you're forcing your engineering staff to dogfood something, you should make sure you're in the same industry as your customers. I've always had a bit of respect for MSFT products in the "I'm a company with about 5 reasonable, but not stellar developers" space. Do I want to build an operating system with Visual Basic? No. Do I force C++ on our loading dock foreman who upskilled to a VB4 dev 'cause he knows the problem domain inside and out? Also no. MSFT traditionally attracted "above average" devs who had the support to work on big projects for a (comparatively) long time.

As J. R. "Bob" Dobbs once said, "I don't practice what I preach because I'm not the kind of person I'm preaching to." ( see https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/J._R._%22Bob%22_Dobbs )

Maybe the engineers complaining about dogfooding vibe-coding tools aren't the kind of developers you should have vibe-coding.