Wisdom Projects ☮️⚧🧘🏾‍♂️

I joined Microsoft in the 2013–14 timeframe and was immediately struck by the quiet competence that ran through the place. Engineers, security people (including the physical security team), lawyers, developers, and others were simply very good at what they did. In many niche areas, the person sitting in the role was, quite literally, “the” person in the industry for that domain. Incident and outage calls reflected the same culture. They were calm, quiet, and professional. I still remember jumping onto a Saturday outage bridge and listening to a group of relatively junior engineers work methodically through their runbooks. When they reached the end of the procedures without a resolution, they pivoted without drama into deep technical troubleshooting well beyond the documented steps. Security incidents were handled the same way. A call might bring 50 people together, yet an L63 or L64 incident manager would run it with clarity—walking through what was known, identifying the gaps, and tasking items across the company. There were roughly three kinds of people who made this work. Junior college hires were often brilliant, highly motivated, and full of energy. Mid-career people, many with kids and living on the Eastside in places like Sammamish, served as the steady anchors of their teams—engineers, PMs, and others with a decade or more of experience who were simply good at their jobs. Then there were the longer-tenured employees, some with 30 years at the company. Microsoft valued that longevity. These people knew where systems had come from and what was under the hood; they were respected for what they knew, regardless of level, and were regularly pulled into meetings with senior leaders to walk through hard problems. Even senior leadership operated in the same spirit. I once got a weekend call from a very well-known Microsoft VP. He was direct and courteous: “Is this X? I’m going through this issue and see that you own a document I’d like to read. Can you give me access? Thanks for the help on a weekend—I really appreciate it.” Around 2020, that culture began to change, and I left not long afterward. I watched the company part ways with many of the people who had solved some of its most significant problems over the previous 20 years. A large number of my former peers and colleagues left as well. It is no longer the company it once was.