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ESR Gets Job Offer From Microsoft
epsalon writes "Eric S. Raymond, the well known Open Source Evangelist, recently received a job offer from Microsoft, that he strongly refused. Is this another attempt to lure Open Source figures or just ignorance?" From his post: "I called [the Microsoft HR rep], who told me my name had been passed to him by his research team. I indicated to him that I thought somebody was probably having a little joke at his expense, and promised him an email reply."
His page :
http://www.catb.org/~esr/
A v- email address at microsoft means that you are not a full time employee, but are a contract worker.
It's a job offer when you are well know.
If he was that well known, apparantly he wouldn't have received the "job offer."
Here is a comment someone made on his site about this:
"This is a simple mistake. The recruiter's email address starts with a "v-", which stands for "vendor", i.e., they are not microsoft employees. I know this because I work there. The recruiter obviously didn't do any research and has sent a standard (templated) email to the applicant. There is no where in the email any indication of "offer of employment" as ESR claims in his reply. Recruiter has tactfully said that he wants to do a preliminary telephone screen. Thats about it."
Ironically, the word ironically is often used incorrectly.
Not just any dot-bomb, but the dot-bomb that happened to have "microsoft's worst nightmare" on their board of directors.
Right, because we all know ESR is on the same level with those two guys because he's responsible for uh... What exactly did he do?
Just for the uninformed (sorry for ruining the joke...) :
Write / maintain software.
Write books, the most known being "The Cathedral and the Bazaar".
Direct from his homepage.
I have discovered a truly marvelous proof of killer sig, which this margin is too narrow to contain.
Presumably he's referring to Raymond's charming essay, just after the LNUX IPO, when he bragged at length about how fantastically rich he now was. (Raymond, IIRC, was on their board with the position of "corporate conscience".)
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
He's showing the stock price of a company that ESR has nothing to do with,
he was on their board of directors and bragged about how rich he was.
The guy is right to some extent.
Wasn't ESR on heir board of directors?
Didn't he write another pompous essay on how he had become a millionaire overnight?
Didn't it all turn out to be... something else?
Wasn't he then quietly removed from the board?
If you hop in to the wayback machine they did the same thing to Borland, hiring all their top people just to put them out to pasture.
Microsoft completely raided the Borland C++ compiler development team.
Borland had the best product and Microsoft's was a crappy also-ran.
After the raid, Microsoft had the best product and Borland never recovered.
gpsd? Or does code not qualify as code?
-russ
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
Very old rule: never say "no" - just quote an astronomical price to the people you don't want to work for. Who knows? They might say "yes" and you'll become really rich or powerful.
I've been approached by Microsoft a few times. My answer is always the same: I'll work for them if I get the authority to prevent any/all product from shipping if the product does anything with or to the Internet that isn't standards compliant. No more "embrace and extend." No more proprietary protocols and file formats.
They usually smile and walk away after that.
The guy does exist in the address book and his title and location do match. So I think the email conversation in grandparent is real.
You can say what you want about ESR, but I use a pile of that guy's software everyday. He's one of the Python committers, he's written more of Emacs than anyone save RMS, and that's literally the tip of the iceberg. Not to mention the fact that he's fairly well spoken, a published author, and a pretty competent PR hack. In short, he would probably make a good addition to just about any team.
If ESR would have labored his entire life on proprietary software he would probably still be skilled, but no one would have a clue other than the few people he worked with (and some of them would probably overlook his talents). Similarly, when Linus wrote Linux he was an undergraduate student in the frozen wastelands of Europe. Free Software gave Linus the opportunity to argue with Andrew Tannenbaum in a public forum and then prove that Andy was *wrong* and that a humble undergrad CS student was right (if you haven't read the comp.os.minix flamewars about Linux you really should). That sort of thing can only happen in a system where working code is more important than credentials. Linus could get a job *anywhere* and it's entirely because he was able to prove his skills with Free Software.
http://linuxtoday.com/news_story.php3?ltsn=1999-1
Given that he article was dated December 1999, this one line struck me as particularly poignant: Doh!
I've googled and couldn't find anything about him being a Python committer, and he doesn't mention it in his resume (you'd think he would).
As for him having "piles of credits in the Linux kernel", here's the relevant extract from the kernel's CREDITS file :
N: Eric S. Raymond
E: esr@thyrsus.com
W: http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/
D: terminfo master file maintainer
D: Editor: Installation HOWTO, Distributions HOWTO, XFree86 HOWTO
D: Author: fetchmail, Emacs VC mode, Emacs GUD mode
Call that a "pile" ?
And yes, Python is not outdated, but I leave it to you to find anything else currently relevant in his resume. The guy's stuck in the 80's.
Sorry to burst your bubble if you're a fan. I used to like him too back in 97 when he first published "The Cathedral and the Bazaar", but he's been going downhill ever since.
As for "what rock I've been living under", just google my name.