AbbeFaria

No, I was in a team in Azure E+P (Edge and Platform). I don’t want to reveal the team as I would out myself.

I didn't get it wrong. I am okay to play politics if there's a prize worth taking, working on impactful products or learning new skills but if all there is to grab is titles or better pay then playing politics is playing the short game.

I am merely 30-years old, hopefully I have a long career or at-least as long as possible but playing politics to play the short game is very short sighted to say the least.

If I want politics, I would rather just re-watch Game of Thrones.

> how many people would work on a typical Microsoft product, and what sort of calibre are they?

There are high talent density orgs at MSFT too. I do not want to give the impression that everyone at MSFT is low calibre. I was at the beginning of the Security org being formed (back then it was a tiny part of E+D). I was a minion who witnessed Security transforming into a 10B+ USD business so there are very qualified people at MSFT. We went from a few hundred devs and PMs to ~10K devs, PMs, Support etc to work on a mature business. There are a host of talented people still at MSFT, also MS continues to publish impactful research in AI, Systems etc. The great Leslie Lamport is still at MSFT. I am not comparing myself to these titans, I am nowhere near that level but just saying that there are oodles of talent at MSFT.

On the other hand, here is an example that is illustrative of the sort of people I encountered towards the end of my tenure. My last manager who was one big reason behind me resigning once told me in my 1-on-1 that I should count myself lucky to be employed at MSFT and that other developers would kill to join MSFT. This was someone who had started his career in TCS, Wipro etc and then worked at a bunch of networking companies who presumably didn't pay that well. Everyone at MSFT is decently paid because the stock is doing well and long may that continue . My last team/org was a 30M$+ business with only one customer, we had maybe ~300 people altogether in the US, UK and India. It felt like we were always support engineers for this one big whale of a customer and we were trying to "pivot" to get more customers but that always seemed fanciful as the product was expressly designed for one customer. MSFT acqui-hired from this customer multiple execs and developers to sell said product to the same customer. I am missing a lot of key details as I wasn't at the inception of this product but the whole org seemed dysfunctional, inefficient and certainly I had low-morale. There just wasn't as much work for that many people.

When I submitted my resignation, they actually tried to retain me! I was befuddled to say the least, I hadn't been that productive at all but I guess they just needed warm bodies to work on some other misguided initiative. Personally, I had enough. I forewent my last tranche of sign-on stocks (a non-trivial amount) but was glad to see the back of this org. It was deleterious to my career, I was so pissed that I didn't even send a farewell email. I don;t blame anyone but myself, I hold myself accountable for my career but this was what I perceived.

Apologies, this felt like a rant and it is partly one. But I never had a frank conversation about this with anyone after I left. My fiance is a Doctor so she can't understand all this but my fellow colleagues in tech will.

I am speaking of the time from 2024 to mid-2025. While upper management was pushing developers to use Copilot, it was still not prevalent.

Post mid-2025, there were mandates to use it wherever we could.

You underestimate how many old-timers are there at MSFT. I don’t imply any negative connotations to that.

But these are the most lucratively paid employees. These are also the same folks that are used to working at the same company and who might find it trying to interview elsewhere.

Ex-MSFT here. I resigned in June, I was an L63. I spent 8 years at MSFT across two stints.

My last 18 months at MSFT were deeply unproductive. Constant reorgs, the work not being aligned to my capabilities and unfortunately just the general feeling that I was under worked and had very little opportunity for career advancement.

I would look at my colleagues and sister teams and wonder, why do they need these many people to work on something so trivial ? Or how did this person get promoted for doing that work ? I am sure envy played a part in the second question but it was legitimate. Remember, all this was before LLM tools were prevalent.

In the end, I left off my own volition. In my last 6 months, I did very little work, if at all any. I thought why am I being paid so handsomely for such little and trivial work. I did try interviewing in a few different teams but didn’t make it (Azure Files and Hyperscale DB). If I had stayed, I would have been swiftly laid off or if I was lucky enough last long till this buyout.

I think same is true for all Big Tech companies. Too many employees doing not enough or quality work.

The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins

Try doing the assignments from MIT 6.5840 Distributed Systems course by Morris and Kaashoek.

As the old saying at MSFT goes, “Shipping is a feature”.

There are a sizeable number of Meta employees that have jobs due to Zuck’s sheer generosity and the fact that he cares about his public image and laying them off in service of Meta’s bottom line won’t look good.

Elon firing half of Twitter just normalized layoffs to such an extent that it’s considered par for the course now, of course macroeconomic conditions have changed but layoffs were always a bit taboo in tech.

To all the sheep at Meta who weren’t sacrificed because Zuck thought it would look too bad on him, how do you know your game is up at Meta ?

As a measly backend programmer, I only have a good mental model of a “lock”, think a sync.Mutex in Golang.

But I wanted to go deeper into the rabbit hole and understand concepts like memory ordering and how atomic operations are actually implemented using the abstractions hw provides.

Any book recommendations or exercises I could do to learn more about this. Thanks.

It’s the nature of our jobs. The artefacts we produce, code and documentation are out in the open, available freely for training LLMs.

That’s not true for highly qualified doctors, patient case histories, patient feedback that helps doctors diagnose or treat patients or for surgeons to operate on patients. All of these actions are high stakes, get it wrong and people could die, AI would never be able to replace them.

I know it’s a troll, This was no MOOC. I didn’t even get a certificate.

I saw the job opening in the careers portal and just cold DM’d the HM. As to why I DM’d, what do I have to lose ? I was already working at MSFT in a different team. The worst that could happen was that he would just ignore the message. Also, I didn’t nag the HM, it was just one DM where I summarised the things I did in the course. He then asked me to send me my resume and that was it.

I “audited” CMU 15-445 in April 2026, a few months ago. I then applied to Azure Hyperscale DB team, and as my pitch to get hired I cold DM’d the hiring manager whatever I finished in the assignments (BPM, Concurrent B-tree, Transaction support etc).

With that, I was able to get the interview although I ended up failing it. My lack of experience in C++ was probably one of the main reasons. Your course helped me stand my own during the interview and even though I had zero database experience apart from finishing the course, I felt adequately prepared.

Thank you for making the course open source. As a working professional, it was helpful to be able to do the course on my own time. Suffice to say, I am a big fan of your work and thank you for introducing me (and other fellow learners) to the interesting world of Databases!