I had a high up at Microsoft try to get me in trouble with my boss because I tried (appropriately) raising concerns that Azure was an near-impossible to target platform for OSS cloud software due to basic missing features. I had another thread with a higher up, with Russinovich on it, in which the principal manager lied repeatedly over, and over, and over about the entire shape of the VMSS API. They shipped anyway and have spent years adapting that API in the exact way I pointed out, and of course now have to support both. I had a team ask me not to ship a feature for (open source software you've all undoubtedly heard of) because they wanted me to use their Azure-proprietary flavor instead. I'm pretty sure that feature never even shipped because that team had designed it so poorly that it wasn't even suitable for tiny deployments.
Microsoft is excellent as using young, passionate folks, especially ones that don't have experience in advocating for themselves, and pretty terrible at promoting or rewarding individual contributors doing their best to push things forward. Oh and my total comp was garbage. I joined a startup and got a 40% bump without even asking.
Last large company I worked for had something along the lines of "improving state of the art at the company" as a performance metric for principal / staff engineers. Basically, if you weren't doing something novel or carving out some personal impact on the development process, tooling, or product itself, they always had something they could hold against you if they wanted.
The net result was, predictably, staff engineers went out of their way to leave feedback on PRs (typically worthless, often self-contradictory within short time spans) to keep their name visible, and any pain point raised and effort to resolve it by senior level developers was shot down because some staff engineer "was working on it".
Yeah. I don't know what "created" means. Was this person strongly advocating for the creation of Copilot, putting together business cases for why Copilot should be created, and fighting with corporate to get dedicated resources onto a Copilot team? Or did this person join as a software engineer and happened to be assigned to the Copilot team? There's a much stronger case for "deserving" (whatever that means in capitalism terms) greater compensation for the former than the latter.
This person is also trying to hire startup roles, so not exactly an unbiased viewpoint, either.
kumarm|2 years ago
"The VP who worked most against Copilot’s creation, would later tell me I didn’t deserve the promo.
That person is now in charge of GitHub Copilot."
If you are a Dev with skills you will see this all the time in big corp.
predictabl3|2 years ago
Microsoft is excellent as using young, passionate folks, especially ones that don't have experience in advocating for themselves, and pretty terrible at promoting or rewarding individual contributors doing their best to push things forward. Oh and my total comp was garbage. I joined a startup and got a 40% bump without even asking.
whateveracct|2 years ago
unknown|2 years ago
[deleted]
ergocoder|2 years ago
I can confidently say no it is not a part of the baseline expectation of any role.
zdragnar|2 years ago
The net result was, predictably, staff engineers went out of their way to leave feedback on PRs (typically worthless, often self-contradictory within short time spans) to keep their name visible, and any pain point raised and effort to resolve it by senior level developers was shot down because some staff engineer "was working on it".
mjr00|2 years ago
This person is also trying to hire startup roles, so not exactly an unbiased viewpoint, either.