Greentext

Eh, I've had a number of coworkers who ended up working for Microsoft. They were all either terrible programmers or utterly unmotivated to do much actual work. One of them was a guy who did not show up even once at my company for more than a year but wasn't fired, for some unknown reason. Microsoft's inability to produce much of anything in the way of good software is no surprise to me.

Personally, I think it has a lot to do with Microsoft's being one of the pioneers of TDD (Test-Driven Development). The idea is that you have a small number of good, experienced developers writing suites of automated tests, coupled with a large number of inexperienced or inept developers who try to write code that passes these tests. Whatever code happens to be good enough is kept and the rest is tossed away. In this model, there is some advantage to sheer numbers even when most of the people you're hiring are pretty terrible at what they do (although these are exactly the kind of employees that can be - and are being - easily replaced by AI).

It's funny to imagine real-world engineering using an approach such as this. Like, imagine a world where they let anybody off the street attempt to build bridges, while the experienced civil engineers spend their time trying to knock them down. You might get a few bridges that actually worked, but your rivers would be clogged with the remains of all the failures.