Worth Reading – Nobody knows how large software products work

If you’ve ever struggled to explain to someone why seemingly tiny changes can cause massive disruption in the M365 environment, you may find this useful explanation about how no one knows everything about large software projects helpful in that endeavor.–

https://www.seangoedecke.com/nobody-knows-how-software-products-work/

This is obviously true of Microsoft:

Non-technical people – at least, ones without a lot of experience working with software products – often believe that software systems are well-understood by the engineers who build them. The idea here is that the system should be understandable because it’s built line-by-line from (largely) deterministic components.

However, while this may be true of small pieces of software, this is almost never true of large software systems. Large software systems are very poorly understood, even by the people most in a position to understand them. Even really basic questions about what the software does often require research to answer. And once you do have a solid answer, it may not be solid for long – each change to a codebase can introduce nuances and exceptions, so you’ve often got to go research the same question multiple times.

I don’t know how many of you have had the opportunity to work with Microsoft engineers. I have, on a few occasions, and it can be quite surreal and eye-opening to spend time showing them how their own tools work and explaining why the results are not correct.

They didn’t know. They don’t use it the way some customers do, and they have never considered what happened with those tools. They had no knowledge of why it was the way it was, or how we got here. It also helped me understand at a deep level how large the M365 platform is and how incredibly difficult it must be to keep up with it internally, let alone for those of us on the outside.

That’s not an excuse for the way M365 works, or doesn’t work, on any given day. Rather, it’s an expectation that things will go sideways, and documentation won’t always be accurate, so it becomes incumbent on all of us to do what we can to stay informed and connected to experts. Microsoft is too big to offer simple support; every question or issue comes with ten or more implications across the platform. That will be a multiple-day question that someone has to research, even as we question why it takes so long to investigate their own product.

But the answer to that question is simple. It’s too large to be knowable.

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