I was an engineer on the Visual Studio team. Many of the issues I worked on were things I found interesting. I wouldn't be surprised if Chen was browsing through open tickets, found this one, and grabbed it.
I was an engineer on the Visual Studio team. Many of the issues I worked on were things I found interesting. I wouldn't be surprised if Chen was browsing through open tickets, found this one, and grabbed it.
I'm pretty sure I heard Chen say on a podcast that he has a significant backlog of posts that he puts up when he feels like it.
Right... but my point was that even distinguished engineers at MS (lvl 70+) go "ticket diving" from time to time. It was somewhat contentious because juniors complained that all the "fun" tickets were taken by seniors.
I was working on some Windows Media DRM stuff and would get pinged with the really loopy support emails, most of the time not to have me fix them, just more of a heads-up. One said "WHY THE FUCK ARE YOU ON MY PC EVERY MORNING GET THE FUCK OFF MY COMPUTER". I actually started to reply to this chap to see if I could get some sense, but a VP was nearby and saw my screen. They picked up my keyboard, wrote "FUCK OFF" and hit send.
And then you got a disciplinary process for telling a customer to fuck off?
My next words were "You know you sent that as me, right?" :)
I'm sorry, but that is kind of hilarious. I was lucky that I rarely had to deal with people like that. Most of the time is was low-level C folks who had found a real bug in one of the tools, compilers, etc.
There's probably a dozen posts at least for getting applications to find their dependencies because of one behavior or another. COM servers, .Net. Trying to get running apps to use an updated PATH or other environment variable.
I don't think this has anything to do with what you responded to?
I think the point is that he's not really active anymore, he's just relaying tales from his past.
I'd be very, very surprised if MS had Raymond motherfuckin' Chen looking at support queues in 2026.
He's telling stories from the past either way. The blog backlog isn't very important.
In an interview he said the backlog has varied from 3 to 18 months. Pretty negligible in terms of his career advancement. This isn't something he wrote ages ago.
> He's telling stories from the past either way.
I'm sorry but why would that bother you? Is my experience not valid any longer?
My point was: it is not at all surprising that a lvl 70 was poking through active support tickets because many of us did the same thing. I retired at Chen's level btw.
I don't know how Chen discovered this issue of course but it could have been exactly how I described it.
> I'm sorry but why would that bother you? Is my experience not valid any longer?
What? Huh? I have no idea what you think I meant but it's not what I meant.
I'm making a simple point: His backlog is not the reason he's talking about a ticket like this in 2026.
Either he took this ticket this year-ish, or he wrote this year-ish about something that happened long before. It is not the case that he wrote this post years and years ago and it was sitting in the backlog for that long.
> Many of the issues I worked on were things I found interesting.
That’s a rare privilege!
I can't even begin to tell you how lucky I felt at the time. I loved the work and the people.