Hacker News Reader

Comment by onlyrealcuzzo | Hacker News Reader

In a world where engineers at MSFT make $300k+ - that pays ~70k engineers for a year.

There are nowhere near 70k engineers working on this - I'd be surprised if even 7k - but this has been in development for years, and will be in development for a few more.

Depending on how many headsets they planned to deliver - I wouldn't be surprised if they each cost more than $1k - there are like 60k infantry soldiers - so that could easily cost >$60M.

I'd imagine they spent >$100M lobbying on this and Jedi.

I can't see how this would cost anywhere near $22Bn - but military contractors are known to have profit margins >30%.

I'm obviously missing a lot of things - but I wouldn't be surprised if this cost MSFT >$10Bn.

View on HN

The one piece of this that might end up costing a ton of money is the testing using live soldiers. Each of those deployments, along with all the heavy equipment is a lot of money. I saw they already have 80k hours of soldier feedback, so in part, that's where some of the money goes. The rest, of course, is figuring out how to make the HoloLens light and reliable, which no one has ever done. Idk, this could be a huge money pit. The Army has tried this idea before and failed. Now might be the time, or this could be another JSF spending fiasco. Either way, MSFT is doing well.

The headsets currently retail for $6k each and they are consumer not military specs.

>but military contractors are known to have profit margins >30%.

Based on what data? Contract bidders must show all direct and indirect costs and are typically allowed to price in ~10% profit when submitting their proposal. In fact, you can look at historical financial data for LMT, NOC, GD, etc and see profit margin float around 7-10%. A proposal with 30% profit margin baked in would be laughed out of the selection committee.

I'm not sure about newer requirements but tricks I've heard of include exploding material costs after the fact, or exploiting some less tracked pressure relief in the contract that exists to eat up cost overruns.

$1k? I would guess $10k+

This is job creation porn. These engineers don't deserve any public money, let alone to prop up their $300K per year salaries.

Microsoft could get better engineers for cheaper. Including within the US. The problem is that this isn't about engineering. It's a scheme.

If MSFT could get better engineers for cheaper - they would. They're a business... Not a charity to engineers.

This is BS. I know how the interview process works. All these big corporations optimize their recruitment processes around pedigree (matched to the curriculum of top universities). They don't look at track record at all; when track record is a far better indication of future performance. That's why their engineers are so incompetent and it costs so much money for them to produce anything.

They have become so incompetent that they don't even have the talent necessary to know what talent looks like when recruiting.

Corporate engineers will never hire other engineers who are better than them (for political reasons), so the engineering talent in these companies has been degrading for years as the bureaucracy and internal politics has increased.

> when track record is a far better indication of future performance

Not all experience transfers over and developing completely new technology (both hardware and software in combination) is extremely hard. I think you're vastly underestimating the value people get from these university degrees when they're actually pioneering new things and actually learned the topics they were taught.

You're comparing corporate big tech to what, the lean and scrappy traditional military contractors? The level of incompetence in the military sector (private and public) is unfathomable unless you experience it in person.

> They have become so incompetent that they don't even have the talent necessary to know what talent looks like when recruiting.

Do you work at MSFT? How do you know so much about their competence?

I know people who work at Microsoft and I can see what kind of software solutions they produce. Of course they do produce some good stuff, they have a few pockets of talent. They've always been strong with gaming and IDEs for example. But anything related to web technologies is just a failure. They don't understand the web. Most of the business they get is due to legacy reasons (e.g. companies who use Azure because their legacy software won't run on anything else). They just come up with solutions and then try to forcibly shove it down developers' throats.

One reason why they suck at web is because they suck at interoperability. They can't do open source properly. They don't know how to optimize software for maximum compatibility. This is because vendor lock-in is the enemy of compatibility and interoperability. Vendor lock-in is in their DNA; everything they do is about lock-in. Their software is all about complex, rigid interfaces; this is how they achieve lock-in but it makes it difficult to integrate their solutions into third party software (high friction, high entry barriers) and difficult to maintain/update.

> can't do open source properly.

VScode?

I work at MSFT, and all I can say is you're quite wrong

How do you gauge track record? Just take the candidate's word for it or do you assess for yourself some how?

Look at past software they've worked on, ask questions about it. If they have open source stuff, look at their code. Ask them about their design decisions; why they designed things a certain way.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com