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Comment by 0x3444ac53 | Hacker News Reader

The bad part is that Microsoft (generally) used to have some of the best QA in the industry, and that was somewhat extended to Xbox. But they laid off their QA team a year or two ago because "AI will change everything!"

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> But they laid off their QA team a year or two ago because "AI will change everything!"

They gutted QA in 2014, ending their software development engineer in test positions, and suggesting the developers should test their own code to get velocity.

Subsequent releases were worse than before, and things have compounded since then. Hard to say that laying off the rest of the team made a noticable difference.

Oh thanks for the correction/supplemental information. The gutting you're referring to might be the huge lay offs that I'm thinking of. Possibly conflating the recent AI driven layoffs with those from 12 years ago.

>The bad part is that Microsoft (generally) used to have some of the best QA in the industry

Blame Satya Nadella. He fired testers and turned customers to helpless beta testers.

Yeah based on your comment and the others, it seems he did an initial purge in 2014.

QA doesn't get enough love :(

This definitely does not extend to games. I remember microsoft games having terrible UX over a decade ago (not the game, the account garbage around it).

So, I've had a pretty shit time with Microsoft products over the last ten years, but it wasn't quite as bad 5-7 years ago. Our disagreement on that might be that I'm only in my late 20s, so if you're older than I am, or had newer consoles than I had around that time, I might be a little more tolerant of jank.

But according to the other replies, it seems Microsoft has been purging QA for years now.

QA got laid off all decade ago. It's been 10 years of bugs like this weeks breaking boot on Dell's.

Thank you for the correction! I think I was conflating the two (having heard about the one from 2014, and then also hearing about the more recent rounds, and not recognizing they were different)

I've edited my comment to correct this. Cheers!

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