They’d have to be hiring recent graduates for you to hear that perspective.
And, as much as what I’ve just said is hyperbolically pessimistic, there is some truth to it.
In the UK a bunch of factors have coincided to put the brakes on hiring, especially smaller and mid-size businesses. AI is the obvious one that gets all the press (although how much it’s really to blame is open to question in my view), but the recent rise in employer AI contribution, and now (anecdotally) the employee rights bill have come together to make companies quite gunshy when it comes to hiring.
In future this will be cited as a canonical example of enshittification.
They’ve extracted 80% or whatever of the value out of customers in the current markets and now, rather than figuring out a new value adding product or service they can offer to make another 80% in a slightly different market, they’re going to expend a completely disproportionate amount of effort to slowly and miserably grind out that last 20% in the markets they already operate in.
> Probably because Microsoft knows vibe coding is _not_ an actual viable way to build production ready code and does not want to deal with the liability issues of prompting customers to move from a working Excel sheet to a broken piece of software that looks like it works.
Whilst you could plausibly argue that Microsoft have spent the past 25 years attempting to stamp them out, this is exactly what VB6 and VBA were.
People built whole businesses on/around these technologies, and people liked them because you could get something working fast. As maligned as they are nowadays they were so widely used because they delivered value.
I am irked that on desktop it does not work in Firefox, but only in Chrome (and presumably other Chromium based browsers).
I'm not a big fan of Chrome, for a variety of reasons, but principally because I don't trust it and can no longer use a good ad blocker, so I never really enjoy having to fire it up.
After watching developer's "making of" video, I went and grabbed my USB gamepad (from twenty years ago) — whenever the gamepad is plugged in, Bruno's gamesite stops responding (until controller is unplugged).
I would recon if this isn't playing on your end, it has more to do with using uncommon hardware configurations (not necessarily lack of horsepower).
I actually used this back in the day: once at university, and then again for a telecoms project in my first job.
But it doesn't mean there's much commonality - beyond superficially C-like syntax - between the languages, and certainly not between their "standard libraries" (aka the browser APIs in JavaScript's case).
Yeah, I agree with you. I remember being annoyed by the name in 1999 because, as you say, JavaScripts's not got much to do with Java other than both languages being superficially C-like... but I don't see it as being confusing for more time than it takes to read introductory tutorials for each language.
You aren’t wrong. I basically stopped using any OSS code backed by Google as a result.
I’d pushed Angular over React[0] for a massive project, and it worked well, but the migration to Angular 2 when it came created a huge amount of non-value-adding work.
Never again.
I don’t even really want to build anything against Gemini, despite how good it is, because I don’t trust Google not to do another rug pull.
[0] I’ve never enjoyed JSX/TSX syntax, nor appreciated the mix of markup with code, but I’ve subsequently learned to live with it.
No one forced you to migrate immediately. (Also, non-value-adding work? You don't think the rewrite to TS did not bring any value? And thanks to that rewrite that app can be upgraded even today to Angular v21. And likely it'll be the case for many years.)
React also went through a lot of churn. (Still does.) There's no magic optimal duration for keeping API stability. Not in general and not for specific projects.
Ecosystems sometimes undergo a phase-shift. Sometimes they take a long time, based on the size. Python 3 was released in 2008, just a year before Angular 1. And the last Py2 release was in 2020, about 2-3 years before the last AngularJS version. (And of course there are many businesses running on py2 still. I know at least one.) These things take plenty of time.
Angular1 was pretty opinionated, willing to break with the tradition of just add one more jQuery plugin.
Miško was working at Google, he persuaded some people to take a look at the framework that he and Adam Abrons were tinkering with.
Angular 2 was announced in 2014 January. And then v1 still got years of support, even the component architecture was "backported" around 1.5 (in 2016?)
You can run old v1 code side-by-side in a v2+ app up until v17. (At least the v17 docs describe the process in full and later docs link to this page. https://v17.angular.io/guide/upgrade )
...
Google did a pretty good job IMHO. Google throws products under the bus, but not so much OSS projects. (Though the sate of AOSP comes to mind.)
> Google throws products under the bus, but not so much OSS projects.
It abandoned the Material Design web components project, which, I think, attracted some Polymer people.
Speaking of Polymer, it has evolved into Lit; but I understand there is no more support for that project from Google. Lit has joined the OpenJS foundation to stay afloat. The Googlers that used to work on Lit, and on Material Design web components have mostly left.
Also, remember the Workbox project? A simple setup for service workers? It's barely alive.
The angular material design library is so much better than the react one. And it is supported by google. The material CDK is amazing to create custom components easily
I think JS is still overall more popular than TS, but if your team forces TS then yeah. It's like Java devs reluctantly switched to JS and were like, this needs more boilerplate.
Yeah, I spent years in Java and then even longer in .NET and it felt like everything I was getting a bit fed up of in those worlds had invaded JS. 20 years ago I could never have imagined defending JS as a language but, as time wore on, I started to appreciate its more stripped back syntax. And then a lot of what’s been added in later ES standards has been great so it seems even more unnecessary to layer TS on top.
It took me a while to appreciate JS too. Thought it was just the beginner language until I used it. Also had to learn the hard way that a web backend is hard to do efficiently without an event loop.
I've never worked at Microsoft. However, I do have some experience with the company.
I worked building tools within the Microsoft ecosystem, both on the SQL Server side, and on the .NET and developer tooling side, and I spent some time working with the NTVS team at Microsoft many years ago, as well as attending plenty of Microsoft conferences and events, working with VSIP contacts, etc. I also know plenty of people who've worked at or partnered with Microsoft.
And to me this all reads like classic Microsoft. I mean, the article even says it: whatever you're doing, it needs to align with whatever the current key strategic priority is. Today that priority is AI, 12 years ago it was Azure, and on and on. And, yes, I'd imagine having to align everything you do to a single priority regardless of how natural that alignment is (or not) gets pretty exhausting, and I'd bet it's pretty easy to burn out on it if you're in an area of the business where this is more of a drag and doesn't seem like it delivers a lot of value. And you'll have to dogfood everything (another longtime Microsoft pattern) core to that priority even if it's crap compared with whatever else might be out there.
But I don't think it's new: it's simply part and parcel of working at Microsoft. And the thing is, as a strategy it's often served them well: Windows[0], Xbox, SQL Server, Visual Studio, Azure, Sharepoint, Office, etc. Doesn't always work, of course: Windows Phone went really badly, but it's striking that this kind of swing and a miss is relatively rare in Microsoft's history.
And so now, of course, they're doing it with AI. And, of course, they're a massive company, so there will be plenty of people there who really aren't having a good time with it. But, although it's far from a foregone conclusion, it would not be a surprise for Microsoft to come from behind and win by repeating their usual strategy... again.
[0] Don't overread this: I'm not necessarily saying I'm a huge fan. In fact I do think Windows, at is core, is a decent operating system, and has been for a very long time. On the back end it works well, and I have no complaints. But I viscerally despise Windows 11 as a desktop operating system. That's right: DESPISE. VISCERALLY. AT A MOLECULAR LEVEL.
Interesting that "Small - Brainstorming" is marked as a bad meeting flavour.
I mean, for starters, I'm not the biggest fan of brainstorming anyway: I tend to be more creative on my own, and then we can come together to compare/refine ideas. A lot of people I've worked with are like this.
But, to me at any rate, if you absolutely must brainstorm then "Medium - Brainstorming" and "Large - Brainstorming" seem like way worse flavours than "Small - Brainstorming". I and too many other people I know tend to withdraw rather than contribute when any kind of meeting gets too large, and especially if it's a brainstorming meeting.
Right now I am struggling to think of anything worse.
Otherwise, agree with everything else in the presentation, and practice most of it as well.
And, as much as what I’ve just said is hyperbolically pessimistic, there is some truth to it.
In the UK a bunch of factors have coincided to put the brakes on hiring, especially smaller and mid-size businesses. AI is the obvious one that gets all the press (although how much it’s really to blame is open to question in my view), but the recent rise in employer AI contribution, and now (anecdotally) the employee rights bill have come together to make companies quite gunshy when it comes to hiring.
reply