ThrowawayB7

Getting big is the same as getting old. Getting big means that they lucked into getting a cash cow and a bureaucracy springs up to manage that cash cow, kind of a necessary evil, and also attracts opportunists who think they can make the cash cow bigger (and enrich themselves in the process). So the business starts bloating up with employees.

MS has had many rounds of layoffs already in the past 2-3 years. If there was anyone visibly checked out, they'd have been gone quite a while ago.

There are so many senior leaders that rose through the ranks at MS from India and the rest of Asia that the claim is simply laughable. They wouldn't tolerate being paid any less than American natives themselves nor would they tolerate their immigrant subordinates being paid less than natives.

Windows 10 was the most recent big push for memory reduction actually, back when MS still harbored ambitions in the smartphone space and wanted a single OS across smartphone, desktop, and server. The minimum RAM requirements for the 32-bit version of Windows 10 was 1GB.

Now we have smartwatches with 4GB of RAM (rolls eyes). WTF do they even do with all that memory?

The product is named Visual C++, that it happened to do C was always kind of a sideshow as far as I could tell. Aside from that, I seem to recall that VC++ had the WORD, DWORD, and eventually QWORD macros to specify unsigned 16, 32 and 64 bit types respectively.

The parent poster said "Linux gaming community". "Most commercial games work fine on Linux now" because a multi-billion dollar corporation, Valve, is paying to maintain Proton to protect their business model, not the Linux community.

> "These sharp edges are a lot less annoying with agents to help solve the problem."

That applies just as much to Windows and MacOS as it does to Linux.

Lay the blame where it belongs: it was one of Satya Nadella's early decisions to eliminate the SDET role at Microsoft. Everybody praised him at the time as some kind of wunderkind for juicing the stock but now Microsoft and users are facing the consequences. Hopefully history will correctly attach responsibility to Nadella for it.

Ask anyone at a FAANG and they will tell you that large corporations get flak every day for a lot of things, some justified and some unjustified. As an IC, you need to tune it all out and let the people whose full time job is to deal with that sort of thing handle it.

Microsoft needs Bill Gates back, the young, abrasive version of him that didn't tolerate bullshit, to call them out on what they're shipping these days.

IBM's PCs were dependable but came at a premium price that was undercut by PC clones. OS/2 might have been superior but it had higher system requirements ($$$) and itself came at a premium price that was undercut by Windows 9x. At the end of the day, it was all about the price.

(Linux, being free as in beer, did the same to Windows Server and the other UNIXes not many years after.)

This is a serious answer: Microsoft dissolved its test discipline in 2014, early in Nadella's reign, in favor of developer-led testing and telemetry based bug detection. The results you can judge for yourself.

Odd that they received a brain teaser at a MS interview in 2015. IIRC that's several years after internal interviewer training was updated to recommend that brain teasers not be used in interviews because they weren't useful.