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@DJGummikuh @GossiTheDog

My experience at Microsoft was that the culture revolves around lying to management.

The entire incentive system (bonuses and promotions) revolves around being able to demonstrate short-term impact. Claiming that a thing is done and ready when it’s actually an early prototype is rewarded.

If you’re an engineer, you claim features are done and downplay bugs and you’ll get a nice bonus and the opportunity to transfer somewhere else before anyone notices that you’ve built a mess.

If you’re managing a team, your best strategy is to over claim on the status and make sure that meetings with PMs and your management exclude any engineers who might tell the truth (and you promote the ones who are willing to lie, because that helps you).

By the time you reach Nadella’s leadership team, all information has gone through multiple rounds of exaggerations or outright lies. And because he says the right things about culture but has absolutely no follow through (and rewards people whose bonuses he directly reviews who directly contradict the things he says are important), this is amplified. People like Kevin ‘must have the shiny thing’ Scott, who exemplify the Peter Principle and would be totally unable to actually judge competence even if his reports weren’t incentivised to lie to him, make strategic decisions.

The company is not able to innovate and is not able to plan any project that extends beyond a semester, unless some people below CVP level manage to do it without their management noticing (if it succeeds, you will learn that the CVPs were outspoken advocates of the project all along, in spite of the fact that they didn’t know it existed until a week earlier).