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Comment by LoganDark | Hacker News Reader

Either they're using GenAI or the entire team collectively lost their minds and started getting a huge number of colossally bad ideas about fundamental primitives of Windows that hadn't changed for decades. Backwards compatibility used to be the major concern and now it feels like they didn't even know what would break ahead of time. If that doesn't feel like GenAI then I don't know what does

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Believe it or not, I find it more plausible that the entire team collectively lost their minds — or more specifically, the leadership. There's a long and sordid history of such things that goes back well before GenAI.

I can sort of get how leadership has been losing its mind with all the ridiculous product launches and renames and force-installed apps and browser extension-installing malware, but that doesn't explain the countless instances of hardware bricks, critical errors like failing to recognize the C: drive, and other really weird and suspicious things that I can't imagine would've been driven by leadership. Maybe leadership is demanding everyone be super reckless? But why would anyone with experience even touch those areas of the operating system enough to break them that badly?? The mistakes they're making really do not seem like mistakes that would be made by even the most rushed possible senior engineers. Maybe they're letting completely inexperienced people touch super low levels and that's the problem? Or completely inexperienced machines...

I suspect they have used rounds of salary-based cuts to boost their PnL in the past, like some other large companies I've worked at, and that only bites you down the road because each time they do it they'll ask, "who do we have to keep?", but you're still losing experienced people and eventually you will get mid-level or junior engineers working on core code.

I don't remember where, but I once read that all the developers that knew and understood the inner workings of core Windows components have left Microsoft many years ago, and that this is part of the reason that they introduced a brand new Settings menu and haven't changed Control Panel since Windows 7. I don't know how reliable that report is so take it with a grain of salt, but it does make a lot of sense considering what's been happening to Windows over the past 10 years.

Raymond Chen is still there. Hell, Dave Cutler is still there.

I suspect their experienced senior engineers that actually knew the products have left, and they cannot attract talent like they once did.

Keep in mind that Microsoft laid-off a large share of their developers shortly before and during the interval the GP talks about.

Repeatedly.

You are right that's one or the other. Probably both are contributing.

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