A candid rant by a Microsoft developer on Microsoft bureaucracy.
I worked at Microsoft for about 7 years total, from 1994 to 1998, and from 2002 to 2006.
The most frustrating year of those seven was the year I spent working on Windows Vista, which was called Longhorn at the time. I spent a full year working on a feature which should’ve been designed, implemented and tested in a week. To my happy surprise (where “happy” is the freude in schadenfreude), Joel Spolsky wrote an article about my feature.
I would like to try to explain how this steaming turd happened.