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Some Developers Leaving Google For Microsoft
recoiledsnake writes "We have heard about lots of talented developers jumping ship from Microsoft to Google, but is the trend beginning to turn? Dare Obasanjo (a Microsoft employee) writes about a few high-profile people picking Microsoft over Google — either making the jump directly, or choosing Microsoft after receiving offers at both. Sergey Solyanik is back to Microsoft and he primarily gripes about the culture and lack of career development at Google. He writes, 'Everything is pretty much run by [engineering] — PMs and testers are conspicuously absent from the process. Google as an organization is not geared — culturally — to delivering enterprise class reliability to its user applications.' Danny Thorpe, who was the key architect of Google Gears, is back at Microsoft for his second stint working on developer technologies related to Windows Live."
sounds like some kind of dream job to me. I guess M$ counter offers protect google for getting the duds.
"Everything is pretty much run by [engineering]"
This is different from Microsoft how?
My experience there as an SDET showed me that development runs the show at Microsoft.
Why else would Steve Ballmer run around like a crazy man chanting "DEVELOPERS! DEVELOPERS! DEVELOPERS! DEVELOPERS! DEVELOPERS! DEVELOPERS!"
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From TFA:
"Some of the web properties are useful (some extremely useful - search), but most of them primarily help people waste time online (blogger, youtube, orkut, etc).
All of them are free, and it's anyone's guess how many people would actually pay, say $5 per month to use Gmail. For me, this really does make the project less interesting if people are not willing to pay for it."
I don't know about that, but they will have to PAY me more than 5$ for using hotmail ever again!.
Just imagine a world where everybody has the same mentality as this guy: Einstein : "You know, who is going to pay me for this theory anyway?, what's the propose?, let's sell donuts"
1) If you're technical, go to Google 2) If you're not, go to Fuckroass
Yes, but they've done that by stifling progress in computer operating systems for at least half that time.
Computer users are starting to route around the damage they're causing. That's why Microsoft feels they are under attack from so many fronts - they're a stationary target in a world that wants rapid movement.
Think Maginot line in the blitzkrieg, if you want your Godwin reference back.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
Software is a machine with thousands of moving parts running on a machine with with several billion moving parts.
The issue with moving parts as a point of failure is that they are prone to breaking on their own. When software fails it is the fault of the programmer, not some mysterious things that are breaking in spite of him.
While I somewhat agree with your sentiment that we should cut programmers some slack, I still believe it is possible for software to work right with very little debugging. If a programmer is spending more time debugging than coding, he's doing it wrong... either that or marketing needs to quit making him bolt on features that the system was never designed to support).
Err... what? Even in the enterprise, I'm seeing Windows being scaled back, replaced, and sometimes outright gutted.
(funny you should mention Sharepoint... I replaced it @ work with TikiWiki for my department. Seems the folks I worked with hated having to email half-mile long URLs to each other just to point someone to a corp Sharepoint-stored file or message
I do agree that MS has a large presence in the corporate world now, but I suspect that if Windows 7 is nothing more than Vista Mark II, and if Moore's Law can't keep up with the bloat factor, this will change drastically (which is why I said "It's not what a company has already done, but what they're wanting to do.").
And no, no amount of book-cooking by Microsoft (counting all OEM and end-user license sales --including XP sales-- as Vista ones) will change that.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
I think the example I brought up is pretty simple; I switched from a hierarchical, folder-based mail client to using gmail exclusively precisely because this is a case which occurs so often (and also because search works so well in gmail - I actually tend to ignore structure and go straight for search most of the time - it's easy to combine tags and search, too, like a shell for mail organization).
You're right, it's usually possible to fit mails into folder structures in a way that has each mail in one or at most two places. It's just that tagging is an even more natural way of doing this, instead of pretending that mails are structured in a folder hierarchy only to then put them into more than one place because there often is not one specific place in a hierarchy where they belong.
To each his own, I guess, but claiming that tags are inferior to folder hierarchies is at best a matter of taste.
Right, which is why you start with a folder hierarchies and map to tags. ;)
But wasn't the original question which was a superset of the other? :-)