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Ask HN: Did Developers Undermine Their Own Profession?
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Steve Ballmer Interview
47 naves 55 9/1/2025, 5:51:27 PM acquired.fm ↗
Satya's mistake though is that he has filled Microsoft with average people. The best fresh graduates from the top colleges went to Google and Facebook in the last decade -- because they paid significantly more -- and Microsoft picked up the rest. What is the impact of that? Microsoft's execution ability is lower, and we'll see the impact of that in the coming years.
Another of Satya's mistakes is his faux pas related to women employees. He was accused -- unfairly in my opinion -- of saying women employees should not ask for a raise. He did no such thing. He said employees should not ask for a raise (not women employees specifically) and instead should rely on the system to give you the appropriate raise at the appropriate time. But since he said that at a women's conference the accusation stood that he meant women employees specifically. Satya has had to fight against this accusation and he has done so by establishing a quota system for promoting women employees. Executive compensation at all levels at Microsoft is directly tied to promotion of women employees, and as a result, a lot of women now occupy positions they would not otherwise. Again, the impact is decreased ability to execute.
Microsoft today is the second most valuable company behind Nvidia. But you wouldn't know that looking at their products. They don't have any interesting new products. To some extend they are coasting. Will their success continue into the next decade? It's going to be interesting to watch.
1. The best new grads are absolutely not going to Google or Meta. There are many far sexier companies. As a CS grad, landing in big tech is mostly regarded as having settled for mediocrity.
2. Microsoft's compensation for early career is competitive with Google and Meta (at least for the first couple of years; Meta will grow your level faster and Google gives better annual RSU refreshers, but many people don't know this and go by the offer's face value). I don't think there's much of a difference in the talent that they can pick up.
Microsoft also aggressively sops up the best talent in Tier 2 geos -- it's unlikely that the best devs in the Bay Area work at Microsoft but some of the best devs in Vancouver or Atlanta probably work at Microsoft.
The point is, if Google and Meta got the best people, what the hell did they do in the last ten years? I think they mostly got more people and less ability to do anything very well. It hasn't worked out that great for them. Neither of them has much to show for their efforts. Google bootstrapped AI and then had their people walk off to form OpenAI who are (for now) best buddies with MS. Facebook/Meta keeps changing their mind about what they are about. Social media, VR, and now AI. But it seems they end up chasing their tail every time.
MS actually got better over the last ten years. They too had a few nice acquisitions. But more importantly, they revitalized what was a pretty dead development strategy. Github was critical. The attitude towards Linux and the complete 180 on open source in general was critical. MS did quite a few things right under Nadella.
> They don't have any interesting new products.
None of these companies do.
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That seems shaky as a justification. I don’t have any data behind it, but in a world of eight billion people, it’s a hard sell that there’s only enough top talent for 3 companies.
Plus, feel free to correct me but I don’t feel Meta has brought anything technically brilliant to the table lately. Google might be a better sell with alphafold and some other projects but none of it seems mainstream tech either.
Maybe pixels if you want to stretch it, but search, maps, Gmail, YouTube, android, and even photos were there a decade ago already.
PyTorch?
> Maybe pixels if you want to stretch it, but search, maps, Gmail, YouTube, android, and even photos were there a decade ago already.
I don't disagree really, in the end all three suck: G, MS, FB. Google did in fact hire all the top talent but only to make sure they don't work on something good for someone else.
I was pleasantly surprised by Llama.
I think that point is fair - at the very least, Microsoft wasn’t in the conversation as far as where the typical CS grad wanted to work - FANG doesn’t even include Microsoft in the acronym (I kid, I realize this doesn’t actually mean anything)
It’s really really interesting what happens - obviously 5000 doesn’t compare to the behemoth that Microsoft is, but it’s still been interesting to see
It really is a confluence of factors that slows things down and I don’t think it’s as simple as saying business process
Some off the top of my head observations:
You have to try really hard to not settle on hires - the more you grow, the bigger the pile of work and you just want help - to the point where you might hire someone who’s good enough vs holding out for someone exceptional
It’s one thing for 100 people to be throwing money at problems in terms of tooling and outside contractors, once you’re big buying things is way more scrutinized - this is good because you don’t waste money on stupid tools, bad because it slows down buying of non stupid tools that you actually need
Things that didn’t matter before start to matter - security things, legal things, privacy things - these activities take time and also slow things down
Some work just doesn’t scale well - where in the past you could get away with throwing cheap manual labor at the problem, at some point you have to build automation to take care of - this speed things up in the long run, but usually you hit a wall first - as in things get so big they get slow - before you finally build the tools. Knowing which tools are worth building ahead of time is really hard
Related to the above - where in the past it made sense to buy a lot saas apps to run your business, these tend to be expensive so you start building your own
That’s just off the top of my head and nothing scientific. Also, I didn’t mention it specifically but of course you still have your run of the mill bureaucracy that slows things down
Is there a way to demonstrate that this actually mattered? That paying more did get them “better” talent that actually made a difference? Ie. not any self serving “they did because they’re better and they’re better because they were paid more.”
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2025/08/28/microsoft-tests-mai-1-previe...
An acquaintance is an H1B at an Alphabet (owned) corp, hired to work a position that anyone with an Industrial Engineering BS could. And he only found out who owned his employer after an inspection by HQ prior to the scale up for Bard.
I'm happy he got the opportunity, and it enabled his family to marry him and for his new wife to come to the US and start a teaching position at a university, but his role could have been filled by a local grad... if they could have been convinced to accept his salary.
On the other hand Microsoft had a fire and passion that I don't really see anymore. I miss Developers, Developers, Developers. Now it's just ads, AI, blah.
But allowing a single person to go from $20B to $130B in assets in 10 years feels like a pretty obvious policy failure.
This is not to say it's his fault. That's how our laws are written. But that is the point of OP. That our policies should be forcing him to sell and put that money back into the economy.
It would be at least as accurate to say it's as close as money can get to not existing at all. Policy should probably not be "forcing" people to realize gains that, in many cases (maybe not MS, but policy has to work for everyone), may as well be Monopoly money.
The whole point of capitalism is to put chunks of economy under control of capable people. If they managed to get rich then on average they're much better at that than the general population.
This is not an unpleasant side-effect, this is the main reason the whole system exists, remove it and it's not capitalism anymore.
Who do you think generated that excess 110 billion? Ballmer's advanced managerial capabilities? Sure "the market" might have valued equity more, but that's still the policy failure. Saying that "this is how this works" is silly. It could just as well work some other way.
The only way for your "policy" to "prevent" is to redistribute the control to someone else, usually bureaucrats. And I, again, strongly believe that it's better for businesses to be controlled by entrepreneurs and not by bureaucrats.
What does this even mean? Pension funds have a lot of board seats? I only see one person from Blackrock on their board right now.
Why would it be bad for a pension fund to have influence on running a company? Are their incentives somehow mis-aligned with other investors?
The Board members are appointed by the Intel Corporate Governance & Nominating Committee, the chair of the committee is Barbara G. Novick, co-founder of BlackRock. The board is de-facto run by the trio of BlackRock, Vanguard and State Street, smaller investors follow their lead.
> Why would it be bad for a pension fund to have influence on running a company? Are their incentives somehow mis-aligned with other investors?
Alignment of interest is not magical: it's necessary to achieve results but it isn't sufficient. You need actual talents, vision, execution to make things happen, not just interest.
Pension funds have no vision beyond "stock go up", no strategy other than "more revenue, less costs". In the end they are roughly as good at running things as are socialist states: economy is owned by everyone so no one in particular, run by people who never proved that can run a lemonade stand. In fact a successful socialist state (if they ever existed) would be indistinguishable from a huge pension fund that swallowed the whole economy.
Thanks I learned something new today. Is Intel unique or is it common? Does Novick have this position due to pension funds specifically, or index funds in general? AIUI index funds own large stakes in many public companies so if this is true, they are all effectively run by Blackrock and Vanguard (or should be).
> You need actual talents, vision, execution to make things happen, not just interest. Pension funds have no vision beyond "stock go up", no strategy other than "more revenue, less costs".
As opposed to other investors? Outside of founder-owners you've described 99% of retail and institutional investors. Why do you believe pension funds specifically lack "talent"? As long as there is competitive pressure in every market, it doesn't matter. Some of them will be right and actually deliver better products, services, and profits.
> In fact a successful socialist state (if they ever existed) would be indistinguishable from a huge pension fund that swallowed the whole economy.
I've long believed that's the only way to make the welfare state numbers (in any country) work in the long run. Not the whole economy but like substantial proportions of the stock market. You can't tax labor to fund retirees when capital captures most of the returns and there are fewer and fewer workers. And you can't renege on promises already made to people who have been contributing throughout their careers. This can work: sovereign wealth funds are an example. Rising productivity is an updraft that pension funds should capture.
Figures. It was a highly profitable division that nobody could figure out what it did or how.
[0] https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2015/07/hear-how-steve-ballme...
But I remember their entire Microsoft episodes felt like a lengthy defense of Steve Ballmer. There were too many instances of “here’s why this bad decision of Steve made sense given the circumstances” or “ here is how people underestimate the contribution of Steve on this good decision.” They were all well argued points, of course, but so numerous that I found myself wondering if the hosts does not have a relationship with Steve.
The existence of this interview does not help with that suspicion.
> Why would I sell, so we have less to give to philanthropy someday, unless I really think Microsoft’s going to underperform the market by essentially the capital gains rate.
guess end of day - money is a scale not an item to be measured.
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/08/05/how-bill-gates-mother-influe...