politics

I used to contract at MSFT back during the 360 3RR era, me and my boss were reworking the support phone tree process flow, because it was wholly inadequate and had many infinite loops that a caller and support agent would end up in...

But yeah, during that, I routinely saw Indian H1B contractors being viciously abused by their higher ups in the caste system who were full time employees.

I tried to call out some of this, and HR's line was literally that it was not politically correct of me to criticize this, because well thats just normal in their culture.

Its fucking disgusting.

MSFT has an entire company culture of its own caste system of various kind of contractors who are basically all lied to by recruiters telling them if they work really hard they'll become full time employees with much better pay and benefits... in reality, that almost never happens, because project managers are all full time, and will routinely sabotage their own projects if the alternative is to actually keep a team on long enough that they'd become full time.

As a recent example of what I mean by this:

Halo Infinite.

MSFT hired a whole team of temp contractors to overhaul the engine that Halo ran on, to massively upgrade it.

By the time significant Halo Infinite production began, basically all of these people who rewrote the engine now were on to some new contract, some other company.

So... nobody in the actual main game dev team can figure out how the overhauled engine (now called SlipSpace) works, they can't ask any of its actual devs for help, they spend a few years trying to develop the game on it, game is buggy as fuck and difficult to work on... and eventually give up and start redoing everything on UE5.

This all happened because MSFT higher ups wanted to penny pinch the development of the foundation of their biggest IPs next game, by using contractors instead of higher paid FTs, and in the end, it cost them enormous amounts of time an money on something they ended up abandoning anyway.

(I mean, there's much more to the story of why Halo Infinite's development was fucked, such as totally rewriting the story of the game midway through development, but the dumpster fire with the engine development is almost entirely due to MSFTs temp vs FT caste system and short term cost avoidant, thus long term cost maximizing management culture.)

Holy shit, is this why California's ban on the caste system failed? Because companies are leveraging it against H1Bs?

Surely it's that the ones in the minority believing that promote each other and make everyone else's life hell.