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Gentoo Founder Quits Microsoft
ChocLinux writes "ZDNet is reporting that Daniel Robbins, the founder of Gentoo Linux, has left his job at Microsoft after only eight months. From the article: 'The reason I decided to leave had to do with my specific experiences working in Microsoft's Linux Lab,' says Robbins. 'I wasn't able to work at my full level of technical ability and I found this frustrating'"
But I suppose, the more experience you get, the more frustrating it becomes!
Ian D. K. Kelly
idkk Consultancy Ltd.
"Quality through Thought"
.. in the software development field, this is normal.
People in software development are constantly learning more and more about their craft, constantly having access to cutting-edge technologies and APIs. But rarely do you have a job where you can play with this stuff on a day-to-day basis, because actual real-life mean and potatoes development takes place using tools and technology 3-5 years behind the curve.
When was the last time you heard of a production application being written in Ruby on Rails, or in D? Sure, there are exceptions to every rule, but for the majority of us, we are stuck using older stuff.
Which is as it should be. Because if left to our own devices, programmers would always use the most whiz-bang, untested, unstable stuff out there. It's the technophile nature.
What took him so long?
Well, come on, though. He had to know what was coming when he took the position.
You don't seriously think Microsoft would let a guy as familiar with Linux as this work in the Linux lab and tweak Linux for maximum performance for their tests, do you? They probably said there were certain things he wasn't allowed to touch, even if it would help. If he were given free reign, then all Microsoft's propagan^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hstudies would have to be futzed some other way.
"City hall" in German is "Rathaus" Kinda explains a few things......
I wish him all the best and I hope he returns to actively manage and develop Gentoo again. You can't blame him for wanting to feed his family and I'm sure he'll be welcomed back to our side.
ConsultingFair.com
But that's not what he said. To quote:
"The reason I decided to leave had to do with my specific experiences working in Microsoft's Linux Lab. Although I believe that the concept behind Microsoft's Linux Lab is a good one, I wasn't able to work at my full level of technical ability and I found this frustrating," he said.Transaltion: they wouldn't give me the resources and the free reign to do something useful. They were pretty much tapping him for his Linux knowledge and hoping to turn that into some kind of Linux-killer. Took him long enough but he finally figured it out.
GetOuttaMySpace - The Anti-Social Network
Daniel Robbins has decided to leave Microsoft to pursue his passion for software development with an independent software vendor where he will be focused on building in .NET on Windows.
A pretty transparent parting PR shot if you ask me. It is very unusual for somebody in MS's position to discuss the specific technologies a departing employee plans to use in his new job. It comes across as desperate, inappropriate, and tacky. MS has also been pushing their "passion" marketing campaign, so the use of the word in that statement is suspicious. I doubt they actually know very much about what he'll be doing, and I am certainly not prepared to take them at their word even if they do.
I think the reasons that Robbins gave for leaving are absolutely poisonous to Microsoft. The idea that even with all their money, they can't keep a Linux guy technically challenged strongly undergirds the increasing awareness that Microsoft no longer gets it with regard to where technology is going in the 21st century. From a technical point of view, they are where mainframes were in the late 70s. Well established, deep pockets, strong existing market structure, and completely incapable of the next stage of IT development.
I'm sure they just hired him so that he wouldn't hack on Gentoo and try to make it better; e.g. MS pays him $150k/year to NOT make a better OS. :d
I think it's important to understand the history of this whole situtation to understand its current state. A few years ago, he came up with the idea for Gentoo. It was innovative at the time because there were few source based distributions out there. The idea of the source based distribution wasn't new, but portage definatly was/is the best source based package manager I've seen out there. He sunk a lot of his own personal money into gentoo that he never got back. When he left to work at MS, it pissed off a lot of purists and a lot of people shunned him. I think his move not to come back to the open source community (right now, anyway) has a lot to do with the fact he poured so much of himself into open source, and once he left to try and not live paycheck to paycheck, people immediatly forgot all of his contributions to gentoo.
If an officer ever threatens to taze you, say you have a pacemaker.
I think if you look at the technologies the mainframe communities invented in the 70's and 80's many of them are just making to Unix/Linux and/or NT in this decade. They had the tecnological vision. They implemented succesfully.
Where they screwed up was culturally. Mainframe customers were conservative and so IS stagnated. The business community became frustrated and started using much worse computers where they had genuine control (PCs). Pretty soon a great deal of crucial business data was not inside the IS/IT depeartments.
With locked down PCs running only corporate approved apps and very strict change management for the desktops you are starting to see a push in the same direction. Give it another 10 years and we'll be right back in 1992 again.
I imagine it would even be profitable for Microsoft to pay skilled people like him only to keep them from contributing to the Linux community...
This is just the sort of reason why, when one of these little Linux/MS "updates" shows up, I just shake my head in despondency, largely because of what you mentioned, that the purists in the Linux community looked at him like a sellout. These are the same sort of "enlightened anti-groupthink" individuals who've been tearing at the buttocks of MS for years, all to the delight of Slashdotters everywhere. And people call MS users "drones"... Whatever.
The longer I read Slashdot, the more I believe there should also a picture of Linus Torvalds in a Borg headgear with maybe a green laser instead of red, right aside of good ol' Billy G. Talk about an exercise in groupthink, 90+% of Slashdotters seem to have drank the Kool-Aid where Linux is concerned.
Now you'll excuse me while I brace for the inevitable modding down into the 10th Circle of Heck to which this post will be subjected.
Back around 1996, I had an opportunity to interview at Microsoft, but I ultimately declined. Although it would have probably been interesting and a nice addition to my resume, I'm quite clear that I would have been uncomfortable the whole time I was there. I'd been in the Unix world for too long, and had very little respect for MS's solutions. Pushing that on unwary comsumers would have just felt too slimy for me.
Perhaps a similar unease finally settled on him too.
It may be that the 8 months is because he was having a hard time finding someone to hire him... ABC Coding Solutions (presuming that this is the proper company) seems like a rather pedestrian company for someone of his ability to move to.
I'm guessing that many Linux-based companies would just look at his resume, say "He's working at Microsoft?!" and put the resume in the circular file.
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
You don't seriously think Microsoft would let a guy as familiar with Linux as this work in the Linux lab and tweak Linux for maximum performance for their tests, do you?
Of course they would. To me it seems that one major point of Microsoft having a Linux lab is for them to push Linux to the limit to find out its strengths and weaknesses and how it compares to Microsoft offerings.
To me it sounds more like he wants to dedicate his time to programming, and that's probably outside the scope of Microsofts Linux lab.
Success is not about your ability to code. Gentoo was successful not because it was great code, but because it was an idea whose time had come.
When you stop just writing code, and actually come up with a great idea, even the best coder in the world will need to write the code out as fast as he or she can, for the simple pleasure of seeing their idea actually take form.
There is a myth doing the rounds which suggests there is always time for a rewrite, but practice suggests that the people who have one good idea usually have better things to do - and are often on to their next good idea. Plus, no-one ever thanks you for a re-write.
With each breath in, a flower somewhere opens; with each breath out, a flower withers away. In between lies beauty.
I suppose working with Anders Hejlsberg on the C# compiler is boring, eh? And writing a Bluetooth stack for Windows Mobile devices... that's probably as boring as implementing Quicksort now, isn't it? Or working on the new Visual Studio Team System source control software... that's cake, since we all know how to implement a simple, scalable revision control system, right?
Here's a thought. Maybe -- just maybe -- your brief interview experience did not expose you to some of the cutting edge work that Microsoft is doing...
Thousands of software engineers working on C code are collectively rolling their eyes right now.
If you think that "high standards" require use of C++ and the STL, then you might want to rethink why you didn't get that offer. Here's a hint: software engineering is not about the language, but how you use it.
Unless they've rewritten it lately, the Linux kernel is written in C. BSD is C as well. In fact, most modern operating systems were written (and are now extended and maintained) in C. I suppose your conclusion about Windows applies to those systems as well?
Oh wait, I almost forgot... while interviewing, you had a chance to skim all 50+ million lines of code in Windows and determine that they were ugly. I guess we'll just take your word for it, then.