More like, no back-compat == millions of mad existing users and developers (for Windows) == not happy.

5-6 levels sounds about right. I'm 7 levels down from the top right now (and don't have anyone under me), but this is the most that I ever had.

Being invited to the podcasts is not necessarily based on seniority, but even if it does, a principal dev has maybe 1-2 fewer management layers above them compared to plain SDEs.

And Microsoft will be happy to sell you an IDE for that.

The corporate strategy does not revolve around MS stack top-to-bottom anymore. It hasn't been like that even in the last couple of years under Ballmer, but that has accelerated a lot under Satya.

How about ISO standard languages? Like C#...

Five or even three years ago, you'd be correct.

But not anymore.

Look at who came to the top alongside Satya. It's people like Scott Guthrie, who have been pushing for more openness and more attention to other platforms rather than just Windows for years now.

"Open source" is actually quite a buzzword inside MS recently. I didn't think I'd ever see a lawyer giving a talk to programmers on F/OSS emphasize that "GPL is not actually bad, you just need to be careful and aware of the implication". As well as describe the historical hostile policy on open source as "stupid and harming competitiveness".

Oh, and the other day, I've seen a guy with a blue badge strolling around the campus in a GPLv3 t-shirt.

Things are changing. Fast.

What made you believe that? S&T is the division that does things like SQL Server, SharePoint and Visual Studio. More recently, Azure.

The guys that do UI were mostly in Windows (duh) and E&D (Windows Phone, Xbox) in the old corporate structure.

I agree that a common currency is a core government concern. I wasn't advocating that the government should be out of the currency business, just positing that cash usage probably has some correlation to government's interaction with your daily life. There are some pretty large cash payments taking place to avoid taxes, or because the government makes sure it is hard to use credit cards for your illegal transaction.

The other point of view is that cash is needed because the government is still all in our business. Get the government out of the morality game and the cash will more or less disappear on its own. In that way, cash usage is a proxy for government oppression.

This is the sort of material which could be used for artificial hearts for lawyers, bankers, and politicians.

Oh, sure, Of course, we have essentially redefined what "natural selection" even means (we didn't remove it entirely, as some people claim - but we did prioritize sexual selection over all other forms).

Eugenics doesn't only concern itself with psychological traits, but also with physical ones. That alone is sufficient to disqualify such categorization.

with stuff that's crappy but incredibly cheap in 3...2...1...

"I have voted for every park, every library, all the school improvements, for light rail, for anything that will make this city better. But now I can't afford to live here anymore."

Ha... cause and effect is a bitch sometimes, isn't it? No doubt she thought all those things would be paid for by other people. If she thought at all.