> In 2014, the company decided it could do without many of its testers. Mary Jo Foley reported that "a good chunk" were being laid off. Microsoft didn't need to bother with traditional methods of testing code. Waterfall was out. Agile was in.
An average software dev today is expected to do the work and have the skillset that used to take half dozen people or more.
First RDB design and management, then planning and specification work, then interfacing with the customer, then testing, then merging UI and backend engineering to "full stack", then merging coding, operations and admin to "devops"… I'm pretty sure that the only reason devs aren't yet expected to make their own sales is that the sales department is a profit center and such sacrosanct.
A pretty thin opinion piece, I was expecting more details. But there are a bunch of comments under that article which is probably juicier than the main text.
The article left out the most important question: are there any lasting negative consequences for Microsoft due to all these accidents? The answer is likely no. And that's all the the shareholders care about sadly. So this will continue to happen imo. Those Quality Assurance testers won't be coming back any time soon.
lol you've 'talked' about switching. I'm really surprised that any startup would be on Teams in the first place. I get enterprises but for startups I would think other tools make more sense (Slack, etc...).
My experience is that document sharing and collaborative edition work insanely well with Office. Visio is fool proof and quality is ok even with a poor connection. The integration with outlook is perfect. The product ecosystem is great so it’s easy to get room booking and auto-connect. Plus, copilot is good at minutes and transcription.
At the price point, it’s pretty much unmatched in my experience. What would people rather use instead?
Microsoft has gone so deep down the gutter, it is almost unbelievable. I am waiting for the day their profits start taking a hit due to a collective boycott.
It will get worse, the combined strike of HTML-based "native" UIs, outsourcing and vibe-coding will be too much for any remaining original devs to defend against.
You are complaining that developers can't keep up with vibe coded features. The solution might actually be more AI.
There's an opportunity to automate some of the QA traditionally done manually. I tried this last week on our main app (not some toy thing):
(turn on agent mode in chat gpt)
"Hey put on your QA hat and test <url> with <user> and password. Give me detailed feedback on UX, bugs, etc."
I was being lazy here with my prompting. But it works shockingly well on anything browser based. It will start using whatever you point it at and do things that normal users might do. Obviously, you can give it more detailed guidelines on what to test, what to ensure is working, etc.
I got a pretty detailed report back and most of it was valid/constructive. I'm planning to do more of this. It beats developers doing QA (they are too biased usually and seem reluctant to do it) and we don't have any dedicated QA people. Manual QA can be very expensive. I don't think the need for that totally goes away, but you should probably focus that on the most valuable/hardest things to test.
In any case, it's pretty cool to watch Chat GPT explore a UI and attempting to use features. It's very thorough and it seems to figure out workarounds for UX issues as well when things don't work as expected. This is exactly the kind of stuff that developers testing their own UIs are blind to. They know where to click and don't even think about it.
A related issue is actually updating documentation and marketing material with up-to date screen captures and screenshots. Annoyingly, Chat GPT doesn't allow me to save the videos it takes of the AI using the browser. But that stuff could actually be documentation gold. Doing this manually is very tedious.
> In 2014, the company decided it could do without many of its testers. Mary Jo Foley reported that "a good chunk" were being laid off. Microsoft didn't need to bother with traditional methods of testing code. Waterfall was out. Agile was in.
An average software dev today is expected to do the work and have the skillset that used to take half dozen people or more.
First RDB design and management, then planning and specification work, then interfacing with the customer, then testing, then merging UI and backend engineering to "full stack", then merging coding, operations and admin to "devops"… I'm pretty sure that the only reason devs aren't yet expected to make their own sales is that the sales department is a profit center and such sacrosanct.
A pretty thin opinion piece, I was expecting more details. But there are a bunch of comments under that article which is probably juicier than the main text.
The article left out the most important question: are there any lasting negative consequences for Microsoft due to all these accidents? The answer is likely no. And that's all the the shareholders care about sadly. So this will continue to happen imo. Those Quality Assurance testers won't be coming back any time soon.
There will be consequences, but long term. Everyone at my startup hates MSFT products and Teams especially. We've talked about switching.
Everyone hates teams, but every company uses it and will keep using it because it's bundled with office anyway.
Things first happen not at all, then all at once.
lol you've 'talked' about switching. I'm really surprised that any startup would be on Teams in the first place. I get enterprises but for startups I would think other tools make more sense (Slack, etc...).
Yeah. I know this one.
Its the same story since like 15+ years now.
I don’t get the Teams hate.
My experience is that document sharing and collaborative edition work insanely well with Office. Visio is fool proof and quality is ok even with a poor connection. The integration with outlook is perfect. The product ecosystem is great so it’s easy to get room booking and auto-connect. Plus, copilot is good at minutes and transcription.
At the price point, it’s pretty much unmatched in my experience. What would people rather use instead?
Most people dislike their government, they however comply with it in the dimensions that matter.
The difference is that every time a new company is founded, it's a clean slate for which tools are used.
Microsoft has gone so deep down the gutter, it is almost unbelievable. I am waiting for the day their profits start taking a hit due to a collective boycott.
Sadly it's the new IBM for conglomerates.
Consequences of having early access to ChatGPT and getting AI knowledge debt?
Reminder: The UEFI/SecureBoot/systemd-boot stack is controlled by Microsoft as well. Microsoft also signs our bootloaders.
“slowly, then all at once”
It will get worse, the combined strike of HTML-based "native" UIs, outsourcing and vibe-coding will be too much for any remaining original devs to defend against.
You are complaining that developers can't keep up with vibe coded features. The solution might actually be more AI.
There's an opportunity to automate some of the QA traditionally done manually. I tried this last week on our main app (not some toy thing):
(turn on agent mode in chat gpt)
I was being lazy here with my prompting. But it works shockingly well on anything browser based. It will start using whatever you point it at and do things that normal users might do. Obviously, you can give it more detailed guidelines on what to test, what to ensure is working, etc.I got a pretty detailed report back and most of it was valid/constructive. I'm planning to do more of this. It beats developers doing QA (they are too biased usually and seem reluctant to do it) and we don't have any dedicated QA people. Manual QA can be very expensive. I don't think the need for that totally goes away, but you should probably focus that on the most valuable/hardest things to test.
In any case, it's pretty cool to watch Chat GPT explore a UI and attempting to use features. It's very thorough and it seems to figure out workarounds for UX issues as well when things don't work as expected. This is exactly the kind of stuff that developers testing their own UIs are blind to. They know where to click and don't even think about it.
A related issue is actually updating documentation and marketing material with up-to date screen captures and screenshots. Annoyingly, Chat GPT doesn't allow me to save the videos it takes of the AI using the browser. But that stuff could actually be documentation gold. Doing this manually is very tedious.
[deleted]
"Robin Williams on Bill Gates"
Why quoting Robin Williams is relevant here?
He seems some kind of actor. Are you quoting his fantasy how Bill Gates thinks?