Comment by WhitneyLand | Hacker News Reader

Comment by WhitneyLand | Hacker News Reader

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Do you think senior management at MS believes your comments are a good idea or at best benign? Or do you think all the details of your comments have just not yet fully reached VP level, legal, and PR?

I'm thinking they'd disapprove. That's just a guess, maybe they think it's fine and great. However, it may be worth at least considering another possibility.

Does your company want random technical employees, making non-technical statements, about how people are "ripping off" MS?

It's your job to raise the flag internally and help people understand up and down the chain, and across functional lines the context and perceived severity of the issue.

It's your job to write a blog post about how great your containers are architected. Not be a lone wolf, self appointed spokesperson using inflammatory language on issues with potential legal implications.

Please don't take this comment in the vein of you're just an engineer shut up and code, in fact you have a critical role as someone with domain expertise.

The point is when you stumble onto a high visibility cross-functional issue, I've found on sensitive topics many organizations seem to appreciate when someone reacts by coordinating, discussing, and facilitating a cross functional, unified response with one designated voice, that acts in the best interests the company.

Why are you policing other company's employees and presuming to know what their job is?

First off I'm not policing anything, because, how would I have the authority to do that?

Secondly you object to me presuming I know what his responsibilities are. I don't claim to know what he codes. However I'm able to make a pretty good guess about what the scope of a MSFT senior developers job is and this kind of thing is not even close, unless it's a special case worked out in advance with others. It wasn't worked out in advance in this case because he says that he made the comments before getting feedback from more senior people on his team.

Finally I assume some of the down votes have mistakenly conflated my comments with trying to hide information behind corporate walls.

I advocate hiding nothing - and fully support the new generation of companies who believe in transparency and ethics.

Being transparent and ethical has nothing to do whatsoever with letting developers try and make legal decisions when it's not their area of expertise. It also doesn't mean that a company shouldn't work together across departments to try to decide the right thing to do.

Good management and coordination between roles don't preclude transparency or doing the right thing in anyway shape or form .

My opinion about ReactOS has nothing to do with my job or my employer, you are trying to make this into something it is not.

Your opinion has a huge amount to do with your job and your employer.

Appeal to authority may be a classical logical fallacy, but it's a highly effective one and is used by many people to infer the merit of an opinion rightly or wrongly so. Yeah, I know it's weird, that people would associate a comment one person posts with the voice of a trillion dollar company. Just happens sometimes.

Moreover I have nothing to gain by trying to "make this into" anything.

Believe it or not, I actually hoped it could be of some help to you as another data point - as far as all the things you take into consideration when choosing how to exercise your bill of rights free speech, which has nothing to do with your corporate free-speech. The latter of which unfortunately has cost many people dearly.

With respect to Microsoft, I'm certainly not making any comment about them as a company one way or another. That wasn't the point because, this concept applies to most large similar tech companies.

Things do change rapidly at such companies. Fwiw, I have done your job, your bosses job, been the janitor, and a few other things there. Things may be different now, but i'm not making the most possible uninformed guesses just to mess with you.

I sincerely hope the truth is known and that there are no negative repercussions for you personally.

This was a fairly pedantic post but I'll reply anyways.

> First off I'm not policing anything, because, how would I have the authority to do that?

Maybe policing isn't the right word, but your earlier post was fairly condescending to axelriet. "I think they'd disapprove... It's your job to do this... It's your job to do that..."

It's subjective, but let's be real, you're probably right.

Moreover, I don't believe in such a philosophy between any two people, so to the extent it is I regret the tone of the comment.

If it makes any difference, the true source of the tone was based on thinking similar to, holy crap that person is backing up into a stove someone speak loudly and quickly... There is no evidence for you to believe that, but I hope you will, somehow, decide the intent was nothing more.

I’m not speaking in the name of the company: I expressed my personal opinion about ReactOS and wrote back in 2017 that I think it’s a ripoff, after looking at their code. I’m not out there to destroy ReactOS, but if you ask me today what I think about it, I’ll give you the same answer.

Axel,

Look at my HN profile and contact me, so I can send you an email and ask you something. Or, put a way to contact you in your HN profile.

What is the point of comments like this besides aiming to seem smarter than the original poster? If you get your way then you would stifle open discussion and information.

I like this honesty and transparency, employers such as Microsoft encouraging it's employees to act in this way is a good thing.

Shutting down discussion behind lawyers and bland public statements should be discouraged.

We like it. But it can be actively harmful to the interests of the company. And its impossible for us to have the facts required to know if this is harmful. That's up to the company. So if they decide to fire employees who are spending their free time harming the company, we can't really get upset about that.

Its simply impossible to say, "no but this openness is good for the company" in an informed way. But we can certainly hope the company comes to this conclusion and encourages openness.

Collaborating across departments with people from different functional areas has absolutely nothing to do with dishonesty or lack of transparency.

If you have good people in those positions in your organization, they will come together and make good decisions.

If you don't have the right people in those positions, then that's not going to be a good thing irrespective of my advice.

Transparency doesn't require anarchy and anarchy doesn't buy transparency.

There are other jobs, would you really want to work some where that makes you afraid to have an opinion?

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