[petterroea]

Skilled engineers in an environment that doesn't care about quality may become dull, or simply be forced by the system they are in to not care. In practice they are just like us and so I assume they would find outlets in their free time.

I haven't spoken to a Microsoft developer in a while because there are few in the hacker communities I'm around (go figure?) so not entirely sure though. I want to understand.

[bonesss]

These giant firms aren’t uniform monoliths, especially MS.

Microsoft has some clear ‘A’ teams (compilers, industry leading languages, F*, pioneering web tech, OS innovations, etc), but also ‘B’, ‘C’ and ‘D’ teams, and MS is often reactively chasing industry trends. They’re industry leaders, but also victims of their Office, Windows, and Cloud teams pooping on one another at critical market junctures.

In .Net land we can inspect their library code. A number of these ‘Enterprise’ packages around their ‘Enterprise’ solutions are … just passable. Often something you’d write a proper version of to avoid clear issues. When our juniors are delivering better than their official offerings, in light of wizardry being displayed elsewhere, I think we are seeing systematic effects of corporate culture and customer base.