> Last thing, the final part 6 comes off as really childish, risks to national security and sending letters to the board, really?
That struck me too. Maybe i've never worked high enough in an org (im unclear how highly ranked the author of the piece is) but i've never been in an org where going over your boss's boss's boss's boss's head and writing a letter to the board was likely to go well.
That said, i could easily believe that both Azure is an absolute mess and that the author of the piece was fired because of how he went about things.
I’d say they’re writing as if they expect everyone to share their ideals, and they’re responding to violations of those ideals in a naive and disempowered way. That doesn’t mean they’re wrong in those ideals, but the way they tried to fix things… they interacted with Cutler, why didn’t they try to influence him to fix things? Or any other senior technical leaders?
I never said I didn’t. It was a multi-year escalation and I shared my concerns widely along with concrete options.
The thing is in corporate environments people avoid admitting anything is wrong because that would make them look bad and also disavows the bosses who promoted them, so the true best interest of the company takes a back seat.
Yeah I get that, I have been in a similar situation. At some point you just want to pull the trigger instead of going along with values that aren't yours. Sure, there is always the way of just silently disagree and move on, but who cares. We live one life not to maximize our careers, but to be who we are. Was an interesting read and wish all the best to you in the future.
It is true that writing to the board will get you noticed, and that you might not like the consequences. If you value having the job then don’t write to the board. Even if you are right, being noticed like that isn’t going to endear you to your boss.
But if you care more about doing the right thing then writing to the board is the right thing to do. And after a few years of working at Microsoft you might not value your job very much either and you too might decide to go out in style.
Windows is ~500 times bigger than Azure, give or take, by machine count, and still many times larger by loc, modules, users, whatever else you want to measure. The heavy lifting (VM/containers, I/O, the things that cannot not be done just like that) is handled by the Windows folks anyway. The only hard part is the VM placement, everything else is mostly regular software engineering, some of medium-hard complexity but nothing that can excuse the need for constant human intervention.
It is, but “Microsoft runs on trust” they say. They also say the CEO’s inbox is always open, actually the CEO himself says it in the yearly mandatory training video on business conduct. So it should be safe, in theory, to openly speak out in the best interest of the customers, no? Rhetorical question :)
I feel like emailing the CEO in this case is just a no-op, the inbox is gatekeeped by his staff and very unlikely he saw your email.
That said, “inbox always open” means you should come with a problem AND a very well detailed solution. But question becomes if you had a detailed solution that was good, why wasn’t it ran up the org chart with buy in and why did it have to skip to the top.
But that's part of a great solution... it sounds like you might have had a good technical solution, but that's only half the solution in enterprise. If your technical solution requires another team to completely retool, its not a great solution overall.
"While some may see this as a dick move and I wasn’t exactly proud of it, but I actually waited for Daniel’s wife, Katie, to go into labor before bringing all of this up with his management."
Holy cow! Now I've unfortunately witnessed some ugly office behavior too, but this is quite another level.
That struck me too. Maybe i've never worked high enough in an org (im unclear how highly ranked the author of the piece is) but i've never been in an org where going over your boss's boss's boss's boss's head and writing a letter to the board was likely to go well.
That said, i could easily believe that both Azure is an absolute mess and that the author of the piece was fired because of how he went about things.