Many years ago in 2003(?) I interviewed for the role of Security Architect for the Office group (the guys who made Excel, Word, Power Point and (I think) Access.) My resume was reasonably good: I had spent the early 90s doing cryptography at Nortel, RSA (back when they were an engineering company) and Certicom. But I was a software engineer and in the late 90s doing Security Architecture for IBM and "several government agencies you might have heard of." I was REALLY ready to leave DHS at the time so was kind of motivated to bring what I learned about writing secure software to industry.

About this time there was a "security stand-down" going down at MSFT in part because several federal customers LITERALLY had to solicit an ACT OF CONGRESS in order to continue to use Win2K (or an early version of XP) with all it's known security flaws. Do not ask me about the version of Win2K in nuclear submarines. (Really. Don't ask me. That was someone else's project. I really don't know anything about it other than the rumors that were swirling around BlackHat.)

So here I am, coming in as some guy who's hip to secure software development and tools and how to convince devs to do the right thing re: security even though they're under a deadline. My third interview of the day was this guy who supposedly wrote Excel and was the "third highest ranking coder in all of MSFT" (not Simonyi, I would have recognized him.) And his first question was "So... how's your QA skills?" This isn't what I'm thinking I'm interviewing for, so I say "Pardon?" and he replies...

"This security thing is bullshit. Bill's going to eventually realize it's bullshit and in a couple months we'll go back to writing software the same way we used to. So I'm going to have to find a job for you and I'm thinking QA; that's the same thing as security."

I did not get that job.

I believe Michael Howard or Dave Leblanc got it. They went on to write a pretty decent book about secure product development and if you're a microsoft shop and have heard of the Secure Development Lifecycle, it's largely because of Michael and Dave.

(Don't worry, I was fine. I went on to work at Handspring and PalmSource and a bunch of enterprisey dev shops that were hip to the idea of developing secure code. And my life was probably filled with fewer headaches than anyone at MSFT.)

But... I remembered that interaction. Microsoft keeps saying "oh yeah! we're big on security!" And in many ways they are. MSVC (or DevStudio or .NET whizbang or whatever they call it now) have several very cool fuzzing and analysis tools. I've heard the Azure group is better about security than they were, though that's rather a low bar. I feel for them since they have a metric boat-load of legacy code and a development methodology that sort of guarantees failure.

They are also the strangest and most conceited group of developers I've met (with the possible exception of Amazon or Facebook or Netflix.) Come to think of it... what the heck is it about these FAANG companies? I bet I'm just meeting the duds. There have GOT to be decent developers in there somewhere.

They're all HUGE dev organizations and I appreciate how difficult it is to get that many developers pointing in the same direction at the same time. But at the end of the day, MSFT has a culture that really doesn't care about security. Or at least that's my take on it. I'm sure there are plenty of places in Redmond where people care about writing code that isn't buggy or vulnerable. But it's 20 years later and it still hasn't spread far enough.

So it goes.