Comment by cantrevealname | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cantrevealname | Hacker News Reader

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> I never quite understood why Microsoft is so hell-bent on adding stupid features, removing useful ones and creating unwanted re-designs for Skype instead improving core features.

I'm looking forward to a Microsoft insider's exposé on what really happened inside the Skype team to destroy such a beloved product. It was indeed loved in its pre-Microsoft heyday around 2008-2010: I remember an international student telling me that Skype changed her life because she could stay in audio & video contact with her family overseas.

Since the Microsoft acquisition, every single aspect of Skype has gotten worse. It's remarkable that if Microsoft had done nothing with Skype other than simply keeping it up-to-date with new releases of Windows, OS X, Linux, etc., it would be a far superior product.

As far as I can tell, only two things keep it alive: the tremendous installed base from when it was a much esteemed program and the fact that it runs on everything -- making it the common denominator when the grumpy Windows desktop guy needs to video chat with the hipster on the newest iPad Pro. :-).

> I'm looking forward to a Microsoft insider's exposé

I interviewed there, soon after the acquisition, maybe nine months. Probably one of the most shocking experiences in many aspects: they flew me from Europe, no one was ready to talk to me, or knew I was coming at all. I waited more than an hour, thought about leaving, hoping they wouldn’t mind paying for my hotel room and flight either way. Then someone who I recognised from their LinkedIn photo passed me, I said hi—they were surprised and thought the interview wasn’t happening.

I had three interviews from people at most three months out of university (nothing but the same two brain-teasers); overall, the place seemed like completely lacking self-awareness. I had lunch with the only person with any experience, the UX researcher/ethnographer (six months out of post-doc) who was… way over everything. Chosen quotes: “Children running a daycare”, “the entitlement is staggering”, she was happy because that paid way better than academia and she could learn about private research, save money, go to meet-ups and interview.

I liked the lunch because I had tried to make my joke during the interview, one about how Skype allows me to get three alerts about the birthday of a recruiter with whom I had an awkward 20-min chat six years ago (wink, wink: I care about users’ experience too). Blank stare from Chad. The UX researcher got it. It wasn’t funny, but at least I felt like I had pushed my bug report at the edge of my ability zone.

I didn’t get a call-back. I was stranded for six months on an email chain with the recruitment coordinator who was only able to reimburse me with a paper check in dollars (I had bank accounts in four different currencies at that point but not dollars). I honestly think that I got so tired of it all that I just forgot… Or maybe I ended up cashing it at pennies on the dollar because my bank had pity on me.

Anyway, a couple of years later, a new colleague at Facebook joins from there. The guy spent his first three months listing all the terrible, terrible things he saw there. Just new ways of being broken, every day over lunch, for a hundred days. I was impressed. That guy isn’t shy. Not sure he’s a great writer, but there was a lot to be learned there.

This is disturbing.

Satya, are you there?

He is busy pushing code to overwrite users' font preferences and install multigigabyte updates...

My experience was similar if somewhat more organised - multiple interviews over an extended period of time, before a trip to their office where no one seemed to realise I was there to be interviewed.

I ended up having lunch with the HR person, who was fairly scathing about the whole thing.

Got an offer - which looked fine, until I realised they had me down to work in another city despite all conversations being about working at the site and with the team closest to me.

> Not sure he’s a great writer, but there was a lot to be learned there.

Would you broadcast here some of the main points he made? Like what's the roots of the all that were.

Honestly, nothing original, just the sheer amount of it was impressive:

- technical debt “so high you could open a central bank” was my favourite quote: he gave implementation details, but it’s hard enough to grasp a working schema, a broken one is just confusing: no indices, bottlenecks everywhere, no monitoring… It was less the individual set-up than the successive obviously inappropriate solutions. Not “queries to this table are slow, let’s factor it, but without checking the query pattern”-bad, more “like let’s host it on a third party service, with incompatible technology, located on a different continent, and edit it 100 times more often” bad.

- every executive decision was going the opposite direction of what anyone could possibly want; so much so that my concerns over usability felt like complaining about the shade of paint after a bomb went off;

- lack of maturity of the team came up a lot; also how arrogant and absent the managers were; he mentioned someone in particular that had completely different architectural ideas every time you saw him. That particular rant has serious racist undertones.

- the product was split in two, or a company was acquired, and they kept the worst code to impose it on others, or only work on the corporate offering… Honestly, I don’t know. It just felt unredeemable.

I asked if I should actively try to work with people who had gone through this because of how much they learned or avoid anyone because they sounded not very self-aware. He clearly advertised for the later. He even said that he edited his own CV to hide that he was ever there. Last time I checked, he’s got a really vague “project at Microsoft as a contractor” there.

Just a heads up that your interview quotes probably come with enough info to uniquely identify the person who was that open with you. Might want to return the favor with some anonymity...

Good shout. I’m actually modified one irrelevant detail in my portrait to prevent that (I always do: it helps identify leaks-- a paranoid habit that I got from working with unreliable people).

But then again, I’d be shocked if those had any consequences: she was probably gone under a month, both quotes were based on staggering observations as we were sitting there. The place acted like recess at a middle-school.

Got my parents a Skype camera that plugged into the Sony TV. The best way to stay in touch with them. They didn't even need to know to operate a smartphone. A few years later - the TV app was disabled, Skype on the phone doesn't stay logged in, call drops, the interface is confusing and we have moved on to FaceTime and WhatsApp now. They took a great product and decimated it.

To be fair this was probably Sony. I bought one of their smart TVs and they canned the YouTube app on it after six months. Plus it was slow as molasses.

I’ve only owned a cheap ass dumb bottom end Samsung TV since and life is better.

It was indeed Microsoft. They disabled for all brands. I had the same problem at the time with my Samsung TV.

Ref: https://techcrunch.com/2016/03/08/skype-is-killing-its-smart...

Gah. That's just horrible.

There should be a minimum supported period of 6 years for all software on smart TVs, the consequences of which are full refund of the initial purchase price of the TV. That'd kill this shit overnight.

I'm inclined to agree, I'm on my second flagship TV in 7 years, the first, A Samsung OLED 3D Smart TV had most of its apps killed within 2-3 years, I'm now on an LG, WebOS so not many apps to start with, but I see this going the same way soon.

I'd love to be able to just not have all of the "smart" features that they kill well within the lifespan of the TV and instead offload them to an external box.

At least the Samsung didn't have huge Netflix, Amazon etc buttons on the remote, like the LG, which will end up doing nothing some day.

Same here, although I got one of those webcams with a built-in Skype client, for my old parents. Now it's a useless prop. My phone (non-Android, non-Apple) came with a fully integrated Skype app, something I haven't seen anywhere else. That's dead too of course. Good job, MS. I'll buy your products.. not.

I have a high end QLED Samsung TV. Horrible, horrible. Audio over HDMI does not work. Had to use optical cable to receiver. Apps hang and have to be reinstalled to recover them, or power yanked at wall socket. It randomly switches from TV or Netflix/Plex app to "HDMI2" or whatever when watching a movie. Doesn't matter if using an external device like an Apple TV - so you can't even treat it like a dumb display, which was my fallback for my previous "Smart" Philips TV. (It only had horribly slow UI, but was stable.)

The panel is top notch. QLED to me is a perfect balance between the over-saturated colors of OLED, and the gray blacks of LED.

But Samsung and software... it never works. Sync photos from Android phone to PC? Oh, the PC software only does 1000 photos at a time. Then you must delete 1000 photos and start over, rinse repeat. That's 22 times if you are helping a friend backup a few years of photos.

Each time I encounter a Samsung device with "smart" anything in it, I think, no it must be OK this time. It can't be that so disparate divisions all produce crappy code, over the more than a decade now I've been following them. But yes. Every. Fucking. Time.

This is the reason I went LG this time, my Samsung TV has all of the issues you're describing.

The LG is marginally better but it still has issues with audio over ARC and figuring out when to switch on the surround amp and when not to. It'll also randomly switch back to the ARC input if something connected gives it a nudge, while I'm doing something else.

I bought high-end in both cases and it really makes you grit your teeth to realise they can't get this right even at the prices you're paying.

Gosh, the more recent microsoft acquisitions (e.g. linkedin, github, etc) won't suffer the same fate, right?

LinkedIn would deserve it though.

I’m not sure you could make LinkedIn worse if you tried.

I took a final look at Linkedin some weeks ago.. hadn't logged in in ages. Totally useless, never-ending scrolling pages, tried to look like FB I guess. No informational content anywhere. So I deleted my account. Something I've had in mind since MS bought it. The updated layout was the final nail in the coffin. No more Linkedin for me, and definitely nothing to miss.

Eh. Both of my last two jobs were through LinkedIn, so if nothing else, it’s worth it for that. Having said that, the social features are fairly useless, and other than when I’ve been actively searching for jobs, I don’t really use it.

Linked also suffered the same fate. They pushed it so hard for it to be a mainstream social media for professionals. Problem is that no one wants to use it as such.

Sort feed by date -> OK. But the setting is not retained. Terrible.

LinkedIn did it to themselves long before MS got involved.

I remember LinkedIn Answers as having real potential - there was the germ of something a bit StackExchange-esque there. I used to go in and help people out and ended up getting a client or two through this organic kind of networking.

So they killed it.

Yes but still Microsoft pushed a new inferior UI a few months after acquisition. So bad it motivates me to finally publish myself my résumé online. Linked UI was corrected a bit afterwards to make it a bit less sucky but it still.. sucks.

I think a company would have to be pretty innovative to make linkedin worse.

I already had a Gitlab account from years ago because they had free private repos. So it was easy to move everything of mine over after the acquisition.

> I think a company would have to be pretty innovative to make linkedin worse.

You might want to sit down for this one. This just came in yesterday.

https://techcrunch.com/2019/02/11/linkedin-debuts-linkedin-l...

> This week, the company is launching live video, giving people and organizations the ability to broadcast real-time video to select groups, or to the LinkedIn world at large.

> Launching in beta first in the U.S., LinkedIn Live (as the product is called) will be invite-only. In coming weeks, LinkedIn will also post a contact form for others who want to get in on the action. It’s not clear when and if LinkedIn will make it possible for everyone to create LinkedIn Live videos, but if you consider how it developed its publishing features for written work, that will come later, too.

> Initial live content that LinkedIn hopes to broadcast lines up with the kind of subject matter you might already see in LinkedIn’s news feed: the plan is to cover conferences, product announcements, Q&As and other events led by influencers and mentors, office hours from a big tech company, earnings calls, graduation and awards ceremonies and more.

> And to underscore how LinkedIn is keen to develop this — especially in its first phase — not as rough-and-ready user-generated content, but as streams of the kinds of videos that fit with its wider ethos, it has selected several third-party developers of live broadcasting streaming services that creators will work with to create and post more polished live video on LinkedIn.

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