Jeffrey Snower was originally demoted over PowerShell

> For recent years, L68 all-in comp is probably right around $1mm a year,

This is in stark contrast of how people below 67 got paid. Their packages have been visibly smaller than those of similar roles in FANNG-like companies. I think this is because resources will concentrate to the top as a company becomes bigger and older most likely because visibility disappears quickly among lower ranks and what they do individually hardly matters. If the theory is correct, the natural conclusion is that one should really seek a career in a fast-growing company unless they are great at navigating a big co's dynamics.

Also very interesting details on his presentation:

"Digital Transformation: Thriving Through the Transition - Jeffrey Snover, Microsoft"

https://youtu.be/nKyF8fzed0w

Probably he was still getting paid a lot? It is MSFT after all.

I imagine that a certain kind of person, willing to write tooling and even get demoted for it, is willing to stick around with a bit of a pay cut anyways.

What makes you think he didn't try to change jobs? It's not like tech interviews are designed to detect this kind of talent.

They make a joke of it in Silicon Valley, "Rest and Vest" check out this clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y30pML-AW4k

Live in California long enough and your work ethic will melt and your life will become much more interesting.

It's because he was interested in philosophy (particularly Leibniz). He also left a job he liked just to develop PowerShell at MS. (he wrote an entire manifesto about it)

Twitter threads are frustrating no matter the content, after two replies I get a banner that blocks me from reading until I register.

Not gonna happen.

> it seems he was demoted for insubordination?

Probably, and what management blunder that would have been if Jeffrey had left Microsoft because of it.

> What became of the leaders that made that decision?

@Dejify: Not sure if you can speak to this, but it'd be nice to know what happened to those who dinged you? - https://twitter.com/Dejify/status/1523025584749629440

@Jsnover reply: "Retired" with a picture of Donald Trump on the Apprentice captioned "Fired" - https://twitter.com/jsnover/status/1523031601390571520

IIRC powershell came about in the mid 2000s when it was the peak Steve Balmer and Windows Vista era for Microsoft. Absolutely none of the senior leaders at that time survived at the company in the long run, at least no one in the Windows organization. Jim Allchin, Steve Sinofsky, etc.

what does DevOps mean in this context?

(I'm asking because I thought k8s is already devops, just as azure is if devs have some access.)

I like the regex touch

Powershell runs on Linux and macos too because of .NET Core/5+. The real reason is likely the same sort of people that are still typing Micro$oft in <current year> and keep spreading FUD that .NET isn't OS.

As a mac user, I was going to provide a flippant answer, but I decided to look into it instead. Personally, I use zsh or a custom built shell scripting library inside swift. Always like to see improvements to shells though. Googled for it and got a dozen guides on how to install it in mac, but none that actually explained how to use it. (One video result looked like it might have some info, but to me that doesn't count as documentation). All the documentation on powershell is targeted at windows devs, and it's just a very different culture.

Flippant answer: the CapitalizationConvention-ShouldScare-EveryoneAway

Would want to look at how people use Power Shell on Windows and compare to how people use bash/tools/procfs/Python/C on *nix.

I think that, on *nix, Power Shell loses to cli tools/bash/procfs for trivial problems, to Python for simple problems, and to native strongly typed languages for complicated problems.

Many Windows APIs are COM based, for both arguments and results, so an OO-based scripting language is helpful.

Unix APIs tend to be less strongly typed. Mostly lists of lists of strings and ints.

Is there really a recent increase in shells on Linux? I can only think of zsh and fish.

Look, I’ve written a lot of powershell, and I don’t mind it at all, but its not surprising at all to me.

Powershell isn’t in the same problem domain as rust/go/Scala/python.

The niche it fills is “calling windows apis from c++” or, more recently, c#.

It’s less effort than that, so it’s useful, on windows.

It is not less effort than using say, a bash script on other platforms because it:

- does not provide unique access to proprietary windows apis (they don’t exist)

- is not installed by default

- does not conform to any standards other than it’s own

- no package manager that works

The question you should ask is: why given that, would you, given that you must install something, choose to install and use powershell instead of python?

There’s no reason. You’d have to specifically like powershell to bother.

Most people don’t care enough to be bothered. Surprise level: 0.

wokwokwok, cobbal and oefrha made excellent points in the sibling comments.

The only thing new PowerShell brings to the table is to pipe structured objects instead of only arbitrary data. And for that you don't need PowerShell itself: The power of the Linux shell isn't really the shell itself, it's in the powerful tools you can call from it and how you can interact with the Kernel and other components of the OS. The shell just gives you a simple interface and the ability to glue lots of small tools together. I think the reason we don't have a popular PowerShell clone, a "shell-with-objects", is that we would need to change how a lot of these tools handle basic data IO. I would love to see that, because sometimes parsing text is annoying, mental overhead; especially when filenames containing whitespaces are involved; but then there are always scripting languages waiting to help out (e.g. I tend to use perl kind of "super powerful shell script").

Also, what's "every day, another shell"? I have been using bash nearly two decades now, with the odd script written for pure sh in case it might be shipped to a customer. After Manjaro duped my into using zsh (I think they changed the default) I am now growing fond of the improved completion and history; but I could still stick to bash without being on a deprecated track.

I don't have any experience with iOS, and haven't scripted in anger in powershell.

Linux and its ecosystem evolved alongside bash. If somebody tried to make a thing, and said thing was difficult to script with bash, nobody used the thing. They would say it's "hard to use". So system facilities and applications that don't script well with a shell script like bash (or csh or zsh to tcsh...) never survived.

Basically, everything in linux automation is a nail, and bash is a very good hammer. DOS/Windows has had .bat scripts forever, which is not a particularly good hammer, but more importantly, Windows automation is very much not-nail like. You need a wrench and a socket set for many tasks, and CMD simply doesn't do that very well. (neither does bash for that matter) So powershell is a godsend. Meanwhile, us linux folks are sitting here with our hammer and all of our nails, and ... well, while I see that sometimes, it's maaaaybe nice to have a screwdriver as well, I certainly don't see the need for powershell.

> Particularly in the recent history of "every day, another shell" on linux/mac.

You'll note that all of these shells try to be a better hammer. None of them go in the direction that powershell goes in.

"Remember the human". Do you start with the assumption that the product has to fit into Windows and do things the Windows way? Or do you start with the assumption that humans are going to use the product and make it in such a way that people can and want to use it.

Not a seasoned mac/Linux user, but would powershell core not work? I believe it's cross platform?

curl, jq

Powershell 7 is cross-platform.

Is there a similar go to in the Mac/Linux worlds? Yeah, it's called Powershell 7! Powershell was ported to cross platform dotnet a few years back. Currently running some Powershell scripts in production on a Linux box.

Curl, jq is the good answer here.

More from the fringe, I'm quite enjoying zx, a really nodejs powered scripting environment. https://github.com/google/zx

Covered somewhat in ZX 3.0 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28195580 (189 points, 8 months ago, 163 points)

This is the fundamental differentiation of Powershell, right? UNIX operates on text streams while Powershell operates on structured data. It is in a better position to do this kind of stuff.

That aside, a lot of contemporary cloudy CLIs will now speak json on stdin/out and JQ will make any json transformations you can imagine.

There are a few projects that take inspiration from PowerShell, but they haven't got mass adoption. I have hopes that Nushell will be a success when it gets to 1.0:

https://www.nushell.sh/

Yes, you can use Python just about anywhere, and it is arguably more sane/readable. Prefer httpie over curl at the command-line as well.

... Neither?

It's a superior alternative to cmd.exe. bash has never been a serious contender for Windows. Before PS you always wrote .bat scripts for cmd.exe (or .vbs for cscript.exe if you were really depraved). Nobody except Linux-first FOSS authors would expect Windows users to have cygwin / msys / mingw32 installed.

PS gave us a saner choice, though we would still usually bundle it with a .bat wrapper, just to a) make it double-clickable and b) set `-ExecutionPolicy Unrestricted`.

If you're asking "is PS better than bash", then sure it's better in some ways and worse in others, but that question only makes sense on Linux where bash is actually an option.

the latter, though I may have some Stockholm syndrome. killer features:

* objects are streamed, not text. I look upon sed and awk and their ilk as stone knives and bear skins. why not just dot into fields?

* first-class interaction with libraries. I can import managed DLLs and call their methods. I don't have to build weird little one-off tools or expose porcelain. I can get at everything, it's profoundly hackable in an un-Windows way.

* the language is vectorized - basically like broadcast operators in something like NumPy. $x.foo gives you x's foo if x is an object, or an array of foos if x is an array of objects. it's really really nice.

* separate commands in one binary and argument (sets) are first-class. there's consistent rules about what "-i" will be short for. personally, I can pull all the valid commands and arguments automatically into my accessibility software for voice typing. the whole standard "verb-noun" thing also makes commands be what you expect and discoverable.

things I don't like include the language itself, its weird bindings to .NET (it predated the C# dynamic support and modern collection types), the restriction to .NET, bad support for streams (not sequences), the slowness, and the syntax looks a bit goofy. but it's worth the warts.

Bash as a shell is not so outstanding. It is the gnu tools and the other command line first Landscape. So bash on windows can never fly because these tools are not natively present (cygwin and friends are just awkward).

So Powershell (and the new terminal) gives us this whole package with its build-in, service and windows provided commandlets.

Consequently: bash will never beat PS on Windows except when someone provided a gnu tools and hundreds of other command line tools for windows.

Dealing with objects rather than strings and parameter autocompletion give massively better discoverability than other shells I've used.

Being able to use all of the .Net classes trivially is also staggeringly useful.

(Not an aficionado) I feel like it is superior in many ways, but the syntax and case sensitivity have always been a barrier for me. It’s still worth it though when it’s the right tool. I don’t do Windows stuff often though so it’s always jarring coming back to it from bash.

Honestly I enjoy writing powershell more than bash scripts. Bash syntax is arcane and sometimes inconsistent where as powershell 7+ is fairly comfortable syntax.

However, powershell does often feel cludgy and I often have have to figure out how to do more complex things. Not a perfect solution but it integrates with Windows nicely.

It's a better design, imo.

Have you ever wanted to write a command line executable and gotten hung up on I/o and parameter parsing?

With PowerShell you can write a cmdlet in C# as a PowerShell module and have strongly typed input and output parameters for free. It's a revelation.

As as scripting language, it's fine but for me the killer feature is being able to easily extend it in a non-scripting language.

PowerShell works on fundamentally different principles than do traditional Unix shells. Unix shells are for loosely coupling small "do one thing and do it well" programs. PowerShell can kinda do this, but its strengths lie in the "object streaming" features which aren't based on external processes at all but on loading .NET libraries with a special API, called cmdlets. In this respect PowerShell is a bit more like the VMS command processor, or using Python or Tcl as a shell. To add a command to a Unix shell, you need but drop an executable in your path. To add a command to PowerShell that takes advantage of PowerShell's features, you need to write a cmdlet in a language like C# and then install the cmdlet. This is also why PowerShell takes so long to boot up: it's probing for and loading installed cmdlets.

For these reasons I do not consider PowerShell to be directly comparable to Unix shells, but it is an essential part of the Windows toolkit because no one wants to use the MS-DOS-like cmd.exe for anything serious.

The latter. I say that as someone who only works with nix systems for the last 5 years. I still write some powershell for stuff at home. I prefer Hyper-V as a hypervisor and use it there.

But the current state makes sense. Everything in Windows is COM, .NET, or a derivative thereof. Having a scripting language that natively speaks to these technologies in a flexible manner is a natural extension.

nix is a lot more of the file based stuff and so a shell language that makes it easy to run a series of tools that operate on text is natural (I.e. awk, sed, grep, xargs)

> in the absence of Bourne-like shells

I never had "Oh I would really liked to have *sh on this Win machine". Some GNU tools, like grep (just because findstr has it's own arcaneties) or sed - but neither of them is the part the shell itself.

Sure, before 2012 if you wanted a little more flow control than provided by cmd you had not really many options (and if you needed portability you would need to use VB/Jscript, not a 3rd party tool), but since then you have PS3 at worst (on 2012/R2), or at least PS5.1 everywhere else, including client SKUs.

And writing even not a complex script with a bunch of if..else is way, way easier in PS, be it for a Win or a *nix machine.

Its far superior, like light years superior. PowerShell will exist, entire MS ecosystem is now based on it. That fear has passed years ago, especially when it got cross-platform. I expect actually to see more pwsh on linux and even OTB pwsh linux distribution (heck, I will make it myself if needed when I get retired).

> "Do you consider PowerShell to be "something we can count on to exist on Windows systems"

Once, yes; then they renamed it "Windows PowerShell" and deprecated it so it's no longer being developed. Instead they started trying to appeal to Linux users with new cross-platform "PowerShell" which you have to install separately. Windows PowerShell is increasingly falling behind that in performance and compatibility. We're heading away from "PowerShell included" back to the old world of "if you have to download and install something to get away from this abandonware legacy thing, why not Python or node.js?".

> "a superior alternative to Bourne shells which only got traction on Windows because Bourne is too deeply embedded in the Unix world"?"

It's a superior alternative to Bourne shells on Windows, and because it's basically Microsoft-Perl or Microsoft-Clunky-Python as well as being a shell, as in - it's more capable than Unix shell because it's a kitchen sink of scripting and programming language as well as command line.

As a sysadmin, you can pull pwsh from my cold dead hands. Evrything being an object is a feature, not a bug. Going back to bash feels like going back a half century.