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Comment by mwattsun | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft is an enterprise company, has a bureaucratic manner and bureaucratic ways of doing things, for example going all in on the XML craze of the late 1990's and early 2000's. There's a lot of ceremony in their projects, TypeScript being a notable exception (at least one that comes to my mind.) It reminds me of a complaint that is interesting to me about India being in love with bureaucracy and paperwork [1]. Somehow it all works and I think they are making strides to be more nimble, but I wonder if it's part of Microsoft's DNA.

[1] It’s 2021 and the Indian bureaucracy remains the greatest impediment to progress

https://theprint.in/opinion/its-2021-and-the-indian-bureaucr...

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Not knowing much about India, but excessive gov. bureaucracy is often a just side effect of rampant corruption.

It goes both ways:

- people wanting to fix the corruption problem through technical means will make it more difficult for individual clerks to make decisions alone, and push for more paper trails.

- the harder the system is to navigate, the easier it is for clerks to get bribes and quid for pro. At some point it can become impossible to get anything done without bribing to accelerate or bypass the checks.

I'm talking more about people who like rules, regulations, organization and order as part of their nature. People who keep their ducks in a row.

I find it pretty funny that you would attribute something to the nature of a people after getting a well reasoned explanation of why people act that way and what the effect is, without even going into the argument.

You are right, I didn't even get involved in the corruption argument. If you think I said something about it, I didn't. It's not interesting to me. You say it's well reasoned but I have no opinion it. The commenter is probably right about corruption and bureaucracies. I was talking about Microsoft. There isn't any corruption of that sort at Microsoft. Maybe in India, I don't know. I was comparing them as organizations that are bureaucratic in nature. I find it interesting that some people like that kind of system and create it, because I don't. To me it seems stifling of creativity and discovery. But maybe I'm missing something and could use more rules and order in my life. I'll keep studying it. I'm glad you pointed out that I was misunderstood.

Not always. Bureaucracy can also result from a risk-averse culture.

That's almost always the case. Most corporates are risk-averse and thus bureaucratic.

The impulse to increase bureaucracy comes from risk-aversion, but you always have other forces to balance. For instance cash transporters are risk averse, but they haven't build secure underground tunnels under every shop and ATM.

Ever increasing bureaucracy probably doesn't come from ever increasing risk-aversion, and more from a dysfunctionning in the balancing mechanisms. Basically it needs to benefit a large portion of the system to keep creeping up.

i wouldn't really form opinion on print's article. I won't criticize it either. Just, refer to couple more places too. Print is often agenda driven than news

I am not sure if you are claiming that MS is bureaucratic inside or the tools and applications they create are hard to use. If we are talking about the inside then it does not seem to have stopped them from becoming gigantic. If you mean that their tools and products are hard to use then I think it differs a lot between products. VSCode is for example very easy to start and use. GitHub seems to get better all the time and is also easy compared to other similar tools and so on. You could say that things like Office is hard but I think they are easy to start using. The hard part is learning all/many of the advanced features and that is ok IMHO.

I'm looking at it from a programmer's point of view, not a users.

Any organization that designs a system (defined broadly) will produce a design whose structure is a copy of the organization's communication structure — Melvin E. Conway

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_law

I'm saying Microsoft is "bureaucratic" in it's nature. I'm not saying it can't change and I do recognize it has been improving in many areas. I celebrate their success. I used to work there. I didn't think what I am saying is controversial because Microsoft itself recognizes this and is taking many steps to become more open, nimble and to iterate development faster.

Would you mind expanding on the "ceremony" around Typescript a little, please? Or if there's an article which explains this that'd be great too. That statement interested me, is all!

Parent said "TypeScript being a notable exception"

My thinking is not original and probably out dated - posted for those who haven't heard this before

Inside the Bureaucracy That Crippled Microsoft

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/07/insid...

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