Maybe the critical question, are they making continuing improvements? Especially to merge conflicting functions.

Like when they bought Minecraft, or Skype. Each already had user management. Xbox was a mess. Merging them all took a lot of years.

when someone says they work at microsoft, they get weird looks, and people assume they're incompetent

- Market monopolies reducing options/leverage

- Outsourcing

- AI automation

- Complexity explosion

These days, every company which has money is using some horrible clunky platform/infra and we spend 99% of our time just working around limitations of those platforms; Problems which were created artificially and don't need to exist... And at the same time we're expected to meet deadlines while almost all of the challenges we face involve certain critical aspects that are totally outside of our control and require us to wait for someone else to fix stuff while we work around it with some crappy solution and we can't just switch platforms or write it from scatch (which would be easier for a lot of us) because the organization forces us to use a particular platform because of the pretext that they are SOC2 compliant. It's total BS!

Not only we have to worry about threats to our jobs, when you look at who is being rewarded in this industry; it's essentially people who create bloat/unnecessary complexity and build these horrible products.

The industry is full of horrible products that everyone uses. There is no incentive for software engineers to be competent because look at what the market rewards!

This in turn affects organization politics; everyone who has some leverage over the platforms is (at least subconsciously) looking for ways to sabotage the tech to maximize billable hours to fix it later... Fixing the platform is their bread and butter so of course they never want to fix it completely. Anyone who tries to do the right thing runs into issues with managers for missing deadlines which they have ZERO control over due to underlying constraints of the platforms they are forced to use. The people 'maintaining' the platforms don't have deadlines do they? They can keep making money from the shit they produce by ensuring they stay shitty and ensuring that the people who actually have deadlines and actually try to get stuff done can't meet them!