It’s almost as if there are different groups in Microsoft with different priorities. Why is it so hard to get 130k people in complete assignment across all areas? Seems like a simple problem.
> It’s almost as if there are different groups in Microsoft with different priorities. Why is it so hard to get 130k people in complete alignment across all areas? Seems like a simple problem.
I feel like this could have been said without the sarcasm and it would have been a great discussion starter. Instead a potentially valid point/retort will be obscured by the tone and discussion surrounding it.
For example:
> Unfortunately large organizations often struggle to get groups into alignment on issues like this, unless there's a strong mandate from the top down (e.g. Amazon).
I am unconvinced that there is a meaningful conversation to have about this. Every time any topic comes up in the context of Microsoft, someone chimes in to state that it’s not their experience. Yeah, Microsoft is not a monolithic entity. It’s literally 130 thousand employees and tens of thousands of contractors. For literally any topic, there will be a subset of people who feel their immediate organization doesn’t match the direction the company intends.
Top down mandate cannot align 130k employees on every topic, even if that attempt were an appropriate thing for upper management to spend their time on.
There might be a more interesting conversation if context were given. If the comment about management not caring about RESTful APIs is coming from someone working as part of a team focused on public APIs, it’s a lot more interesting than someone working on desktop clients.
Edit: You know what, you’re right. I read the comment as a flippant “pft, that’s not my experience” and responded as such. I should have assumed better intent. Maybe the commenter was questioning why their experience doesn’t match up with this. Maybe they were asking why management isn’t pushing this effectively. I assumed a specific intent and should have considered different potential intentions.
There are a limited number of mandates that can come from the top. Upper management loses credibility when they issue endless mandates, even if all of the mandates are reasonable.
It’s also unrealistic that everyone underneath can focus on many mandates at once. Which leads to the loss of credibility when mandates start getting ignored out of necessity.
Yes, for any specific mandate like this, it could easily be accomplished. The point is that in aggregate there are too many of these to accomplish. Competent management will choose the highest value things to focus on. This isn’t defeatism. This is realism. Focusing on everything is the same as focusing on nothing.
Realistically, mandating RESTful APIs at the exec level is unlikely to be a big win for Microsoft. The teams working on APIs at scale are largely already doing this (and you’ll notice multiple groups represented by the authors). The teams that aren’t doing this are largely not building APIs that benefit a great deal from RESTful APIs, because they’re building internal APIs or similar and RESTfulness would be nice to have but not particularly impactful.
