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Comment by allenu | Hacker News Reader

This was definitely not a great experience, but my hunch is what happened is some higher ups decided no, they don't need to hire you, the original team tells recruiting to notify you, recruiting drops the ball somehow, team goes on with their lives believing that you were told they were no longer interested, and everyone (except you, since you never got notified) believed the whole thing was resolved.

The original people (not recruiters) who reached out to you should've connected after the decision was made. They probably figured the recruiters would do their dirty work, so no need to engage.

Full disclosure: I worked at Microsoft for over a decade, so I know how slow and lumbering it can be. I bet some emails were missed and people didn't follow up because "they had a lot of other things they were tracking".

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> some higher ups decided no, they don't need to hire you

Total misjudgment on their part. Thanks to this one HN post they already lost in terms of developer good will way more than his potential salary would be.

Every time anyone who uses WinGet, who read this, will think 'oh, yeah, that's the tool that Microsoft build their version of behind original author's back, while stringing him and ghosting for few months".

Realistically, though, a year from now nobody will care. I mean, I started in this industry in the "MS is outright evil" era. How many people did they screw over? If I remember correctly, there was even a guy who was owed a pile of stock/stock options and when he got cancer they suddenly went missing (no need to pay the dead guy!). Day by day, year by year, these misdeeds are seen as irrelevant. MS is a different company these days (almost literally). Should we hold them accountable for their past sins forever? (I have a friend who still refuses to buy products from Nestle given their ancient "poison in baby formula is OK as long as it saves us money" stance. That's older than I am!)

In reality, these kinds of antics just don't hurt companies significantly -- even ridiculously horrible things that are arguably crimes against humanity (have I invoked Godwin's law?) In comparison to some of the incredibly awful things companies do (and get away with), this is minor to the point of not even being a footnote in the annals of evil (note to self: don't google that term to check the spelling...).

However, there will be a few of us who will be reminded of why we don't do business with MS (and hence will have no need of WinGet). It won't make any difference, but it will be there.

Fair enough, but your friend is right about Nestlé. They're still doing loads of shady stuff.

Welp, I, for one, have resolved to never by VW thanks to Dieselgate. I can empathise with your Nestle hating friend.

>a year from now nobody will care

I suspect a week from now, 99% of people who read this will have forgotten about it.

About Nestlé's poison baby formula: I though their baby formula was safe, but the problem is that they gave it away (maybe still do?) for free to new mothers in developing countries and when the mothers stopped lactating (because their own milk wasn't being drunk) they made the price hopelessly unaffordable so now the babies couldn't drink from either source, or at least needed to over-dilute the formula.

Totally reasonable to still boycott them, makes more sense than getting annoyed at Microsoft in a situation like this (which is also deserved but more minor in the grand scheme of things).

That's more recent. A long time ago (and I'm working from memory, so best to fact check anything I say, because my memory is terrible) it was common to use a particular rat poison in dry milk (and I forget exactly what it was). There were certain standards as to how much rat poison you were allowed to have. It was well known that this would kill a small percentage of babies, but it was thought to be a reasonable tradeoff at the time. To be fair, it wasn't just Nestle. In Japan, the dairy giant Morinaga had the exact same problem. I believe there were law suits that dragged on for literal generations and eventually things changed.

This is the episode I could find: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morinaga_Milk_arsenic_poisonin...

Which was inadverted addition of arsenic specific to Morinaga in Japan, and not Nestle. However, the committe which managed the case and dragged it on was not created by the company but the Japanese government consisting of a newspaper publisher (??), a hospital director, 2 lawyers and a human rights lecturer.

So it seems like an insufficiently related market and lack of oversight made this drag on causing many deaths and even more people crippled by arsenic. One person was sentenced to 3 years in prison.

Compare with China who executed 2 people involved in the 2008 milk scandal and gave much harsher sentences to others. Although that scandal was deliberate rather than a cover up of bad practices.

What's the point of even adding rat poison in baby formula? What does that accomplish?

My understanding was that it's while it is in bulk storage in warehouses. It keeps the rat population down. I've been trying to find evidence that I'm correct about this and like another commenter has posted, it may be that I'm confusing the Morinaga problems with Nestle. However, I was sure I heard about Nestle before I heard about Morinaga, but... My memory isn't the greatest :-(

What Nestlé did was unforgivable. It was clearly lead by psychopaths at the time and we have no way of knowing that is not still true.

The problem is people have short memories and are driven by convenience so will conveniently forget how evil a company is when they show another side. Or sometimes they can continue being evil and people still just do nothing because it's so convenient (see Amazon).

There is not enough direct experience of the evil for our monkey brains to make sense of it. If you see someone kill a baby with their own two hands you will never trade with that person again, they are dead to you full stop. If a company knowingly kills babies by proxy and extorts mothers you get mad for an afternoon then you forget. We need to evolve as a species or find some way to make it more real.

I guess it might help to reaffirm the beliefs of somebody who was teetering in their distrust of Microsoft like myself.

I've been anti-Microsoft for about 15 years but even I'll admit that I've warmed up to them over the past few years because of their seemingly good works (and amazing PR). Stuff like this helps me remember why healthy skepticism is still super important when it comes to giant companies like MS.

Yes. Microsoft really dropped the ball on this one.

So much of what Microsoft has been doing — GitHub, .NET Core, NPM, Visual Studio Code, Windows Subsystem for Linux, etc. — has been to build goodwill with “developers! developers! developers!” Taking the resources to do an acquihire (or hire + bonus) right is small relative to the PR hit.

Exactly. All the things you mentioned are great, and a sign that after decades of being insular, blindly corporately evil, Microsoft started becoming worthy of interest.

And when I first heard about WinGet I though, "Yay! They continue to catch up to the place where developers are! Good for them!", but then this surfaced.

> Windows Subsystem for Linux, etc. — has been to build goodwill with “developers!

WSL has been built for webdevs not to flock to *NIX from Windows, nothing else.

Even naming it "Windows Subsystem for Linux" is an insult, since it sounds as if it was something for Linux, when in reality it's a "Linux Subsystem for Windows" and doesn't benefit Linux itself in any way.

> Even naming it "Windows Subsystem for Linux" is an insult…

The developers of WSL have said* that was mostly a legal concern. Calling it “Linux Subsystem for Windows” (listing “Linux” first) has wider implications for copyright/licensing:

> Just who is allowed to call a product or service Linux, anyway?

> Linus Torvalds has an answer for that: Nobody. Not without his say-so.

> The term "Linux" is a trademark and Torvalds owns it. His assignee, an organization called the Linux Mark Institute (LMI), is empowered to collect licensing fees from companies and individuals who want to use the word commercially.

> - https://www.infoworld.com/article/2671387/linus-gets-tough-o...

*I think it was during a Microsoft Build 2020 Q&A with the WSL team, but I can't find the video on YouTube.

Are you telling me MS could not be bothered to even ask Linus? And if there's a fee to pay it? They're a multi-billion dollar corp telling us they love Linux now.

Alternatively, calling it something like Nix subsystem for Windows or maybe just LSW would also do the trick, this seems like a lame excuse.

It was more that he could have said "No" to them, where as in this case he cannot really say "no" (or "yes" for that matter).

There was little to nothing to acquire. And judging from the radio silence post interview, the author didn't meet the bar for hiring.

It's a bit lame to say recruiting must have dropped the ball. If you've engaged with someone, you're inspired by their technology, etc., etc. then handing them over to recruiting for a rejection is pretty weak.

I totally agree.

It's a totally different world inside a huge company like Microsoft, though. It's massive and its own little world. After working inside for a few years, you start thinking that it's "normal". You see projects start up and get shut down, you see people trying to get into the company, you see people trying to transfer to other teams within the company, you see people trying to leave the company, you see people in the same team for a decade or more, etc. Because of the scale of things, you sort of become numb to a lot of things you see, so I sort of "understand" if somebody just figured recruiting would sort out that someone wasn't the right "fit" for the company.

I don't think this kind of behavior is necessarily the right one, but it's the outcome of a large behemoth made up tens of thousands of people.

No experience at Microsoft but plenty with lawyers in large corps and I would rate another possibility highly, which is that the team wanted to contact him but lawyers recommended "no further contact" as the safest legal IP path. Essentially, they were trying to close the barn door on clean-rooming the software and any further conversation could leak non-open-source ip that would then bring about a liability later on.

I can see that happening at Microsoft for sure. There's no doubt legal would've been involved with the conversations and gave heads up to all people on the interview loop.

This is probably what happened. As a hiring manager i want to tell the candidates whenever we reject them but sometimes recruiting drops the ball and never reaches out with rejection email or call (our team usually calls them).

This happened to one of my referrals so i know this firsthand.

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