The Disillusionment of Pete Wright
Pete Wright says “Goodbye Microsoft!“ Several people assumed that he was quitting a job at Microsoft; or that he was quitting his job because of Microsoft products.
But that’s not true.
In fact, you can paraphrase his letter as “I can’t stand the companies, and particularly the people, who use Microsoft software; so I am going into a career where I will see as few of those people as possible.”
Even DHH doesn’t claim that Ruby can change the corporate soul, so if Ruby on Rails gets popular in enterprises, Pete would have to drop Ruby and move to whatever is elite/trendy at that time. The new new thing becomes the new old thing; that’s the way of life. So, in essence, he is saying “I would rather work with people like me than with typical people.”
It’s actually understandable. Most of have done this at some point in our careers — mainframe to midrange to pc to web. And just like young employees at Microsoft used to get sick of old-timers saying “IBM already solved this problem 20 years ago”, perhaps the younger Ruby programmers will roll their eyes when Pete relates lessons learned from his experience with Microsoft products. And we’ll see how long the total embargo lasts.
September 13th, 2006 at 10:32 am
I see Pete Write’s defection as symptomatic of Microsoft’s failure to woo the developer community. Microsoft’s focus on the corporate customer, has turned it into IBM of yore. Pete may complain about his experiences working with Microsoft technologies previously, but he obviously found them compelling enough to stick to and and be evangelical about them. Obviously something changed on Microsoft’s end to open the door for his exit from the Microsoft community.
As I explained to someone yesterday, if a young talented developer was weighing job offers from Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, and [insert-web-2.0-company-here], why would he pick Microsoft? Assuming the offers were comparable, what kind of developer would pick Microsoft? Now think back 10 years and ask the same questsion (replacing the competitors with equivalents from that era, Oracle/Sun/Netscape/etc).
What I see is that the only person who is going to pick Microsoft is someone who is looking for a ’safe’ job. Good benefits, job security, decent enough coworkers… Microsoft needs to fix it’s boring reputation and start luring in top minds, and not just one or two. Potential employees need to know that the when they decide to move on from the great team with whom they interviewed that there is an array of other great teams. I’m coming up on my 1yr ex-MS aniversary, but I can definitely say that I found a serious dearth of ‘great’ teams, when I was looking the months before I finally left. Talking with people since does nothing to make me believe that this has changed, and I’m not likely to seriously consider any job offer from MS because of that.
September 16th, 2006 at 4:05 pm
Derek:
[Off Topic - but in your blog you say something about mouse-centricity]
You might want to look at W3C/WAI Recommendation for Web Content Accessibility wherein any operation performable by a mouse must also be doable with other “assistive technology”.
Love.