Looking at the top few comment threads, I don't see much shitting going on in non-downvoted comments at least, rather valid questions and answers on who this guy is and why he was selected CTO (a position more like chief visionary). Having worked for Microsoft myself, these decisions, and more importantly their consequences, always seem to be opaque unless you are somehow in the know.

There has always been an attitude of cynicism that tries to masquerade as wisdom around these parts.

An absolute goldmine for http://reddit.com/r/iamverysmart/ material.

There's a reason /r/ProgrammingCirclejerk is basically /r/HackerNews

That sub is kind of a heat check against the hype of pretty much everything these days.

They could change the name to /r/ShitHNSays

Unfortunately good technical conversation and that often come together and I don't want to tune out a large part of my industry.

Wow, that is really hard to read.

Err, they are not disjoint concepts.

We HN users overdo the criticism, but what exactly led you to say that? These are the top comments in the thread:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13475414 "props"

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13475184 "interesting"

and:

Was linkedin really known for their engineering? Honest question I don't recall ever hearing anything good or bad.

What would a thread look like that wasn't "shitting all over the guy"?

Engineering wise, they've been a pretty interesting company... they were relatively early (large company) adopters of using the same views (via node) for client/server rendering via JS.

They've also done some unscrupulous things, even if interesting tech wise (the email proxy on iOS, and WTF they are even doing on iOS today and weren't blacklisted is beyond me). I do think he/they could have some positive impacts internally in terms of a lot of the integrations coming into Office365 today. Who knows though.

Judging from the work so far on Office365, and how great VS Code and Azure all around are doing, I'm not entirely certain they need to change too much. I'm more leery about LinkedIn's really spammy culture leaking into the really cool things coming out of MS, on top of privacy complains already surrounding windows 10.

Not sure why you're being downvoted, it's sort of common knowledge that LinkedIn used really shady dark patterns in order to increase user acquisition.

>I'm more leery about LinkedIn's really spammy culture leaking into the really cool things coming out of MS, on top of privacy complains already surrounding windows 10.

Windows has a lot of business users and is a consumer product; now i would guess that the privacy issues don't quite help with the business audience - but i guess that's a major cash cow; Anybody care to explain how they happen to put a major revenue source in jeopardy? I mean as a software company they aren't too much into targeted advertising anyway, so what do they do with all the data that they are gathering?

i don't know much about business, please enlighten me.

Well, my understanding is most of the telemetry data concerns application launches and crashes... so they, in effect know which software you are installing, and how it is doing overall. Not to mention other potential tracking information (software piracy trends). This allows them to intercede and know what areas to invest in internally.

The pro and enterprise versions allow you to disable pretty much all of this. The Home version is less able. A lot of the additional data is leaked by using cortana for searches.

That said, I'm not too paranoid about it, but I do understand why others may well be. Also, MS has been doing everything it can, including relatively great pricing to move SMBs to their hosted solutions for AD and Office365 packages. Which I can see as appealing for MS and SMBs. The more recent workspace/scheduling applications added to o365 show this direction, and integrating with LinkedIn cements this a little bit.

Who knows how it will work out in the end... I've been specifically pushing Docker Cloud simply because it can target multiple cloud systems for deploy, instead of the walling in from AWS/GC/Azure in terms of a lot of their own Docker tooling support. In the end, you're paying someone. How much you pay and what you get out of it will vary. But you are paying.

Kafka, Samza and a lot of other projects

For a company the size and breadth of MS, what does CTO even mean though?

I can say as someone who was removed from a CTO position for being "too technical" is a very good question!

[NB In hindsight it was probably the right thing to happen - but finding out during a sales presentation to a customer probably wasn't a great idea...]

Assuming something isn't valid because it contains a fallacy is in and of itself a fallacy. Ad hominems are used all the time in extremely valid ways.

Take what he said in spirit, instead of literally.

It is invalid because the ad hominem is the entire content of the comment. There is no content other than the attack on HNers.

Well that's clearly false to everyone else, and again, is kind of irrelevant.

I wouldn't necessarily say so. Rightfully pointing out that someone has made a statement which doesn't add anything to the discussion or support their argument is a valid counter to ad-hominem attacks which aren't automatically themselves ad-hominem.

Further, it's not an ad hominem to insult somebody while arguing with them. It's only an ad hominem if the insult is the basis of your argument.

The entire basis of the argument I am replying to is that people shouldn't be criticizing because "meanwhile back in their own lives, they still have to argue with project managers over the "right" way to get code done."

So that is the very definition of an ad hominem. The comment had no actual rebuttal to said 'shitting' that it was attacking.