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Microsoft Software Linux

Gentoo Founder Quits Microsoft 271

Posted by Zonk from the employee-retention-problems dept.
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'"
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Gentoo Founder Quits Microsoft More

Gentoo Founder Quits Microsoft

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  • Again? (Score:5, Funny)

    by chinton ( 151403 ) <chinton001-slashdot@nospAM.gmail.com> on Tuesday February 14, 2006 @02:49PM (#14717786) Journal
    What, did he have 2 different jobs at Microsoft?

  • That's always been my experience (Score:5, Insightful)

    by idkk ( 414241 ) <idkk@idkk.com> on Tuesday February 14, 2006 @02:49PM (#14717787) Homepage
    But I suppose, the more experience you get, the more frustrating it becomes!
    • You should change your tag line and you'd have more luck. It all depends on attitude.

      Hal Porter Consulting.
      We'll debug your application at the weekend. Then we'll come in on Monday, find the halfwit employee that checked in the code that broke it, put a printout of the diff on his desk, hold his face very close to it and say "NO! BAD! DO NOT DO THIS AGAIN!". Employees can be trained, like kittens or puppies.

  • Hmm (Score:5, Funny)

    by Freiheit ( 237665 ) on Tuesday February 14, 2006 @02:50PM (#14717794)
    It's a shame that he wasn't able to use his full skill set working for that company. Nothing worse than being at a job you're more than qualified for but not getting to use all you know.

    • Re:Hmm (Score:3, Funny)

      by truthsearch ( 249536 )
      ... except for all the extra time availabe for reading slashdot.

    • For most... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by brunes69 ( 86786 ) <`gro.daetsriek' `ta' `todhsals'> on Tuesday February 14, 2006 @02:55PM (#14717861)
      .. 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.

      • Re:For most... (Score:5, Interesting)

        by Pantero Blanco ( 792776 ) on Tuesday February 14, 2006 @03:01PM (#14717953)
        "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."

        Of course, that's what the home, lab, or combination of the two is for. One of the niftiest things about open source projects is that they give the bleeding-edge "untested" stuff a testing ground and developer community, and often result in useful software. There generally aren't set-in-stone deadlines or things that absolutely "cannot go down", so people are free to use what they like.

        It also takes up their free time, sadly. Oh, well.
      • Actually, I have never heard of D being used in any kind of project. Which I find sad as D looks like C++ without all the egregious design flaws.

        • Re:For most... (Score:3, Informative)

          by quanticle ( 843097 )
          /*Actually, I have never heard of D being used in any kind of project.*/

          Well there is Torus Trooper (http://www.asahi-net.or.jp/~cs8k-cyu/windows/tt_e .html).  Its not huge, or terribly useful, but it and all of the other little games written by that author are developed in D, using the BulletML library.

          These games are quite fun, too, in an old-fashioned arcade sort of way.
      • It is not clear from the article what happened.

        I feel the same, I'm not "able to work at my full level of technical ability and I found this frustrating". But it is not a problem of not having access to cutting-edge technologies and APIs. My boss accepts any technology I suggest without any problems... But my work frustration is not about technology. To be able to use full level of technical ability one needs the whole team working and cooperating on the highest professional level possible. If there is any
      • When was the last time you heard of a production application being written in Ruby on Rails, or in D?

        Well last time I heard of a company using leading edge technology they went out of business. Saw many of these in the dot com boom days. Companies latching on right and left to the buzz words of the day in order to get investment money. Sadly most of the time the employees had little experience in the technologies had few tools to deal with performances and stability issues. In the end they couldn't deliv
      • It depends too much on context to be easily categorized. I would argue that people drawing up specifications and designs should not be concerned at all with new technologies, because specifications should be implementation-independent. I would argue that QA people should certainly use proven methods, as they have to be certain WHERE problems are introduced, and that requires limiting the number of variables. Again, with maintenance Software Engineers, mix-n-match of new ideas with old designs is often not a

    • Re:Hmm (Score:5, Insightful)

      by cbiltcliffe ( 186293 ) on Tuesday February 14, 2006 @02:59PM (#14717922) Homepage Journal
      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.

      • Re:Hmm (Score:4, Insightful)

        by Alef ( 605149 ) on Tuesday February 14, 2006 @03:40PM (#14718437)
        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?

        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...

      • Re:Hmm (Score:3, Informative)

        by eneville ( 745111 )
        Microsoft's propagan^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H

        FYI ^W is delete word.

    • Re:Hmm (Score:5, Funny)

      by Capt James McCarthy ( 860294 ) on Tuesday February 14, 2006 @03:01PM (#14717956) Journal
      It's a shame that he wasn't able to use his full skill set working for that company. Nothing worse than being at a job you're more than qualified for but not getting to use all you know.

      Are you in the cube next to me?

    • Re:Hmm (Score:3, Insightful)

      by L7_ ( 645377 )
      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

      • Re:Hmm (Score:2, Interesting)

        by Lord Laraby ( 944374 )
        Yes... Well it's no different from the major oil companies hiring the young engineer that invented the more efficient engine, or the better gas alternative... then locking away the formula and paying him to keep his mouth shut. My guess, since Microsoft has probably gotten him to sign a contract not to work on the competition even after he left, we won't see any improvements to Linux by him for some time. Oh well... LL >
      • If he had only understood that he was supposed to do nothing... He could have had an extended paid vacation. "Just don't do any of that Linux stuff."

  • No wonder I got no reply (Score:4, Funny)

    by drewzhrodague ( 606182 ) <drew@nOsPaM.zhrodague.net> on Tuesday February 14, 2006 @02:52PM (#14717817) Homepage Journal
    I sent applied several times over the years to Microsoft. I think I got form-letters in reply, thanking me for doing so. I guess there just aren't many jobs for a UNIX systems administrator at Microsoft. Too bad, too, as I think I'd be able to help them, in some small way.

  • Zombified? (Score:5, Funny)

    by Doctor Memory ( 6336 ) on Tuesday February 14, 2006 @02:53PM (#14717835)
    Sounds like they sucked his brain out and poured MS oatmeal in the hole. From TFA:

    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.

    • Re:Zombified? (Score:5, Funny)

      by amliebsch ( 724858 ) on Tuesday February 14, 2006 @03:14PM (#14718117) Journal
      I think I see what happened...

      STEVE BALLMER: Dan, we need you to work on customizing these Linux installations.
      DANIEL: Sure thing Steve, right after I get done working on this .NET program.
      STEVE: Yeah. See, the thing is, you're kind of behind, and we have some tests we need to run. So...yeah. If you could work on that, that would be great.
      (ONE HOUR LATER)
      STEVE: So, Dan, how are those Linux tests coming?
      DANIEL: Yeah, good news, I'm almost started. Check out this .NET object-oriented Outlook clone I've been working on. It uses GTK# and even runs in Mono! Isn't that super?
      STEVE: Can you stand up for a second? I need to use your chair.

    • 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 w

      • Re:Zombified? (Score:5, Insightful)

        by jbolden ( 176878 ) on Tuesday February 14, 2006 @03:30PM (#14718323) Homepage
        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.

  • pursue passion in .net on windows? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by jzeejunk ( 878194 ) on Tuesday February 14, 2006 @02:54PM (#14717840) Journal
    FTA:
    ... to pursue his passion for software development with an independent software vendor where he will be focused on building in .NET on Windows ...

    If he wanted to build .net apps on Windows why would he leave M$FT? I mean that is probably the place to be if that really was his passion. I can't believe how much BS these people come up with.
    • Do you really think they would say that if that was not what Daniel was actually doing? It is easily verifiable. The guy is not stupid. Daniel *is* going to work for a company on .Net stuff.

    • Re:pursue passion in .net on windows? (Score:5, Funny)

      by biglig2 ( 89374 ) on Tuesday February 14, 2006 @06:33PM (#14720000) Homepage Journal
      What else is the poor devil going to do apart from .NET coding? Imagine the interview if he went for a Linux job:

      "Hi Daniel, so you're an expert Linux hacker, sounds great, just what we are looking for. Oh, by the way, where was your last job at?"
      "Well, I worked for Microsoft."
      "Hah, yeah, that's funny. A Linux hacker working for Microsoft! Seriously, where did you work?"
      "Microsoft! I was head of their Linux department! Steve Balmer recruited me!"
      "Oh, I see. Say, could you excuse me while I just make a quick call? Thanks. Security? Yeah, we got another code three here."

  • Shocked! (Score:5, Funny)

    by Elladan ( 17598 ) on Tuesday February 14, 2006 @02:58PM (#14717902)
    I'm shocked. Shocked I say!

    I was so sure that the founder of Gentoo getting a job at Microsoft was going to end well...
  • I was honestly shocked when I first heard about Mr. Robbins leaving one of the more geek-oriented Linux distros to work at MS. I'm sure there's much more to the story that isn't being said publicly, but he probably found the hive-like corporate culture incompatible to the freedom he had when managing his hard core distro. Going from being a superstar in the Linux/OSS world to one of the Joe's at MS had to be a huge shock.

    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.

  • Guess I'd get tired too... (Score:5, Funny)

    by bitbiper ( 954491 ) on Tuesday February 14, 2006 @03:02PM (#14717966)
    after dodging chairs all day...

  • Specific Experience (Score:4, Funny)

    by wmajik ( 688431 ) <wmajik AT yahoo DOT com> on Tuesday February 14, 2006 @03:04PM (#14717989) Homepage Journal
    The reason I decided to leave had to do with my specific experiences..

    "Specific experience" with Microsoft eh?? I had one of those before! Like the time I switched over to that other non-really-real search engine company and the CEO started making monkey noises (something about "I love this company!!! RAWR!!") and throwing a chair around the room.

    I love specifics :)
  • 'I wasn't able to work at my full level of technical ability and I found this frustrating'

    Eeek, welcome to my (our?) world! Go back to Gentoo, perhaps there's a way to make a living off it after all (if not, at least you'll have that happy feeling back!

  • Nice Editing Job... (Score:5, Informative)

    by ThinkFr33ly ( 902481 ) on Tuesday February 14, 2006 @03:07PM (#14718030)
    What a great job the poster did at editing out any pro-Microsoft sentiments in the article summary.

    We wouldn't want to have that filth on the front page of Slashdot, now would we? Here is the full quote that was only partially included in the article summary:

    "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.

    Also, earlier in the article:

    "I didn't make the decision to leave Microsoft due to concerns about the company as a whole -- Microsoft has just had a string of very successful product launches and I anticipate that it will continue to enjoy great success," he said.

    • Re:Nice Editing Job... (Score:4, Funny)

      by Saeed al-Sahaf ( 665390 ) on Tuesday February 14, 2006 @03:22PM (#14718208) Homepage
      "You're new here, right?"

      "What do you expect, this is Slashdot..."

      "Zonk posted it, need I say more?"

      Profit!

    • The only reason comments like those are made is so he can have references and future employers won't be less likely to hire him because he will feel freely to badmouth his them if he leaves. Nothing can be more fake than comments like those so I don't see how the slashdot editors failed at all. We were just being protected from the necessary babble ensuring nobody is mad and everyone can still find work.
      • Ah yes, of course. It couldn't possibly be that his comments were honest or anything.

        I guess his choice of leaving Microsoft to do development of .NET application for Windows is also just a ploy for future employment as well.

        Get a grip man.

  • Comment removed (Score:5, Funny)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Tuesday February 14, 2006 @03:08PM (#14718033)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • That doesn't sound like a problem to me...
    • I think he may have asked when he'd get to -funroll-loops and they gave him a slinky to straighten.

    • Re:It probably went like this... (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Like2Byte ( 542992 ) <Like2Byte@@@yahoo...com> on Tuesday February 14, 2006 @04:58PM (#14719149) Homepage
      This really happened...

      It was 1997 or 1998. I was working for a multimedia company making training software for submariners. Two recently retired Navy Submarine Chiefs were hired to do some story-board writing. Typically, this entailed an Access 2.0 database with a vb front-end so they could enter their work.

      The day they were hired the hiring manager, an ex submarine CO, hadn't procured an office to place them in...Nor desks, nor chairs, nor {{drum roll}} ... computers. When they inquired as to how they were going to get anything done without a computer to do it on the manager excused himself. Ten minutes later he came back with a stack of printed blank 'story-boards' and two sharpened #2 pencils.

      They lasted at the company about three months - just long enough to get jobs at an aerospace corporation where the employees were taken seriously.

  • I wonder what the final straw was for him? (Score:4, Funny)

    by DebianDog ( 472284 ) <dan.danslagle@com> on Tuesday February 14, 2006 @03:08PM (#14718042) Homepage
    (Dan) I want to port .net native to Linux
    (Microsoft) Umm... NO!!!
    (Dan) Later Fucktards!!!

    Note: Joke leeched from Nucrash on ZDNet

  • Bummer (Score:5, Funny)

    by 187807 ( 883881 ) on Tuesday February 14, 2006 @03:17PM (#14718151)
    From TFS:
    "...has left his job at Microsoft after only eight months."

    Sheesh, he didn't even have enough time to finish compiling Gentoo once.

  • Follow up interview (Score:5, Funny)

    by gooman ( 709147 ) on Tuesday February 14, 2006 @03:20PM (#14718189) Journal
    After an eight month study, Mr. Robbins concluded that TCO for Microsoft was significantly higher than Linux.

    Mr. Robbins was overheard to say, "While Gentoo may cost countless hours of tweaking for bleeding-edge performance, Microsoft required the sale of one's soul to a man named Lucifer and yet resulted in only average performance."

    When asked for their reply, Mr. Balmer cursed and threw a chair at this reporter. Mr. Gates only response was to place his fingertips together while saying, "Excellent."

    No further comment was available.

  • Perhaps they wanted to "embrace and extend" his abilities by turning him into a windows coder or something...

  • Did the source go with him? (Score:5, Funny)

    by saboola ( 655522 ) on Tuesday February 14, 2006 @03:22PM (#14718224)
    Tomorrow on slashdot: "Wintoo Announced" "Win32 installation that compiles itself to the specific needs of the hardware upon installation. Developers for Wintoo are remaining anonymous for the time being."

  • Some history on him (Score:5, Insightful)

    by porkThreeWays ( 895269 ) on Tuesday February 14, 2006 @03:23PM (#14718227)
    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.

    • NewBorg (Score:4, Insightful)

      by ElboRuum ( 946542 ) on Tuesday February 14, 2006 @03:54PM (#14718566)
      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.

      • Re:NewBorg (Score:5, Insightful)

        by SalsaDoom ( 14830 ) on Tuesday February 14, 2006 @04:25PM (#14718874) Journal
        And you deserve to be modded down too, but I won't do it. I'm a gentoo user, have been for many years now. When I heard drobbins was leaving for MSFT I was pretty choked about that in a way, but when I heard that it was because he had financial troubles and just needed a job that paid well... well, I understood. I wasn't entirely happy with it, but I understand that a man needs to pay the bills.

        Now -- according to you, the everyone was seething about drobbins leaving for MSFT. It wasn't like that, we were all disappointed that drobbins had to end up at a place where we figured he wouldn't be happy and that was it. I spent a lot of time on the forums and on the irc channels back then and I never heard anyone call him a traitor or other shit like that. It made us sad, not angry -- those of us who are adults understand that you need a job that pays and sometimes that means not working on OSS all day long. drobbins MADE SURE that Gentoo would be free before he left and that proved to use that he was a good sort.

        I didn't hear from these "purists" in the linux community, I don't think you did either. Some jackass somewhere might have said something but they were just some jackass somewhere and not a representative of anyones beliefs but their own.

        Botton line: The Gentoo Linux community understood that their former leader had financial problems and needed a regular paying job. We wished him the best and still do.

        --SD

        • The hacker and the artist (Score:5, Interesting)

          by typical ( 886006 ) on Wednesday February 15, 2006 @12:52AM (#14722265) Journal
          I spent a lot of time on the forums and on the irc channels back then and I never heard anyone call him a traitor or other shit like that. It made us sad, not angry -- those of us who are adults understand that you need a job that pays and sometimes that means not working on OSS all day long.

          I think that an awful lot of people would be very surprised how many of the hackers that write open source software have a day job in which they write closed source software. If someone wants to attack those hackers as "selling out" or a "traitor", it'd be kind of silly. Lots of hackers (I suspect the majority of hackers) write open source software because they want to make something *good* for themselves and their fellow hackers. They want to enjoy a world time pressures, bad administrative-level ideas, language and platform requirements are all just a bad dream, and they can create truly nifty stuff. It's not because they consider themselves soldiers in some crusade -- sure, it's a fun idea to play with, but it's not really why people spend their time working on something neat. Open Source just allows hanging out and showing off with other hackers, and making it easier for other hacker-types to give a hand.

          Maybe a good analogy for hackery would be the guy who is a commercial graphic designer by day and an artist by night. All day he has to churn out relatively boring things for people who often come up with absurd requirements. He has to work under time pressure and doesn't have the freedom he'd like to experiment with his ideas. However, at night, he can try out his ideas, do really interesting stuff, and so forth. Just because he has to churn out bread-and-butter stuff doesn't mean that he can't legitimately explore at night.

          Put simply, the hacker is the artist of the computer world.
    • That's the problem I have with OSS purists. There is this sense of entitlement to free code and no notion of rewarding someone who works hard besides a pat on the back. I believe this hurts OSS as a whole. I don't think the openness of code, which is a good thing, should be tightly coupled with getting something for nothing.

      You could say it fuels projects by forcing contributions but I believe popular OSS projects take off for different reasons, not because people had to pitch in, but because they wanted to
      • I'd say it was more to do with his choice of employer. Why did he go to work for the biggest detractor of OSS. Were there no positions available with a more OSS-friendly corp rather than the company that does its very best to undermine it at every turn?
    • Which makes me think, maybe after spending so much of his own money on Gentoo he took the Microsoft offer for a G.O.O.D. job. After he made enough money and paid back his creditors, he just dumped them and went back home to a place he knows will provide him with just enough salary to feed his family and pay the mortgage. Exit MS, exit OSS, hello worry-free life.

      (GOOD job = Get-Out-Of-Debt job)

      So I dont expect him to appear on the radar anymore. Ciao Dan, and thanks for all the ebuilds.
    • As far as there being few source based distros, I suppose so... but BSDs, which he got inspiration from, are all source based. Not saying Gentoo doesn't have it's redeemeing qualities, and you did say source based distros weren't a new concept, but there were already options for running an open OS and building it from source.

    • 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,

      Yeah, because I'm sure Microsoft is the ONLY PLACE where the founder of Gentoo could get a decent paying job.

  • drama (Score:5, Interesting)

    by buddha42 ( 539539 ) on Tuesday February 14, 2006 @03:25PM (#14718245)
    They probably made him use redhat enterprise and forced him to use the rpm-provided versions of software.
  • I wasn't able to work at my full level of technical ability and I found this frustrating

    Maybe the secret agenda of the Microsoft Linux Lab is to corner the most talented Linux developers and discourage them so completely that they'll never compete with MS again. This one got away, but how many more have been ensnared?

  • Understandable, from my experience (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 14, 2006 @03:56PM (#14718583)
    While I use Gentoo, I don't know too much about it. But from what I've seen, Daniel must be a very sharp programmer. Very strong people typically have a rather difficult time landing decent jobs. There just aren't than many interesting and fulfilling jobs out there.

    People who are interviewing are typically looking for people to work for them. If you are a very strong/experienced person, that is going to be a hard role to fill. You are their peer, if not more. Nobody wants to hire someone who is going to challenge them.

    I recently had an on-site interview at Microsoft. Seattle is really nice and Microsoft is, after all, Microsoft. Had they offered me the job (which they didn't), I would have taken it. But I would not have been happy there and would have probably left after 8 months or so. Here are my impressions from the experience...

    Contrary to popular opinion, Microsoft does hire lots of *nix people. But you aren't going to be doing cutting edge work. They don't even use C++. No, I don't mean they use C#. They use C and lots of reference-counted pointers. No STL at all. Windows is really pretty ugly inside. If you are programmer with very high standards, you aren't going to like it.

    I don't know why I didn't get the job. But I definitely wasn't a good fit. I think Daniel was of such a caliber that they just had to hire him. In the end, he wasn't a good fit either.
    • Nobody wants to hire someone who is going to challenge them.

      Some of us would love to be able to hire someone better than us, or who would challenge us. If only because it makes the work more enjoyable. Which is why we have three admin type positions empty for 6 months.

    • Quick to judge (Score:4, Insightful)

      by kylef ( 196302 ) on Tuesday February 14, 2006 @09:25PM (#14721231)
      Contrary to popular opinion, Microsoft does hire lots of *nix people. But you aren't going to be doing cutting edge work.

      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...

      They don't even use C++. No, I don't mean they use C#. They use C and lots of reference-counted pointers. No STL at all. Windows is really pretty ugly inside. If you are programmer with very high standards, you aren't going to like it.

      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.

  • In other news Google hires founder of Gentoo Linux (Score:4, Funny)

    by CYDVicious ( 834329 ) on Tuesday February 14, 2006 @03:57PM (#14718594) Homepage
    In other news Google hires founder of Gentoo Linux, and Office Depot acquires new contract with Microsoft for office chairs.

  • Gimme a break (Score:5, Interesting)

    by heroine ( 1220 ) on Tuesday February 14, 2006 @04:11PM (#14718741) Homepage
    5 job changes and layoffs later you'll find not working to your ability is the way it's done in that country. American job titles are not egalitarian like Hong Kong or Japan. The software engineering level is pretty much the same no matter where you go or what you do. Only if you network your way into management does the work get creative or challenging.

    Hard to believe with all the information available from generation after generation of celebrity Linux programmer doing the same thing, they still have this attitude of quitting day job after day job thinking the next one is going to be better but never really getting anywhere.

  • Wow ... 8 months! (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Stephen Samuel ( 106962 ) <samuel@NOsPaM.bcgreen.com> on Tuesday February 14, 2006 @04:15PM (#14718770) Homepage Journal
    I'm surprised that he lasted that long!

    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 [abccodes.com] (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.

  • i don't blame him (Score:3, Funny)

    by Flunitrazepam ( 664690 ) on Tuesday February 14, 2006 @04:19PM (#14718809) Journal
    i'd be frustrated too after 8 months filled with days spent trying 'emerge longhorn'

  • Robbins *cannot* code (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Hackeron ( 704093 ) on Tuesday February 14, 2006 @04:43PM (#14719011) Journal
    Portage is proof of this. Have you seen how bad the code is? - You cannot tell where the backend stops and where the frontend begins.

    Try to import portage and see how far you get? -- the emerge frontend does *everything*, portage is just a couple IO functions easier achieved with cat.

    If Robbins feels he wasnt used to his full potential in Microsoft, then, hmm, nice to know the "real world" is much easier than all us students expect ;)

    • Re:Robbins *cannot* code (Score:4, Insightful)

      by 0-9a-f ( 445046 ) <drhex0x06@poztiv.com> on Tuesday February 14, 2006 @07:03PM (#14720275) Homepage

      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.

      • Re:Robbins *cannot* code (Score:4, Informative)

        by Hackeron ( 704093 ) on Tuesday February 14, 2006 @07:25PM (#14720438) Journal
        Yes, I agree with you 100% - Robbins is a fantastic project manager, gentoo to this day has bar none the best documentation of any opensource project I've seen and to get a Linux distribution off the ground like that with over 100 competing, Robbins is a great man.

        I was responding to the comments of "he must be such a sharp coder", his code is quite possibly the worst python code I've ever seen, hacking portage was just painful.
    • A lot of this is really true, but it isn't just because of Daniel. Lots of the portage code was thrown together very hastily. Most of the features were tacked on, without any concept of how much of a mess it was making the code. The current portge team has been working to rectify this situation, but it is very hard to do when you have something like portage and must keep backwards compatibility while still keeping yourself sane. There was the portage-ng project which was supposed to be this miraculous r

  • A conversation heard in the lab (Score:5, Funny)

    by Bloater ( 12932 ) on Tuesday February 14, 2006 @04:52PM (#14719094) Homepage Journal
    PHB: "So, you're persuing technical excellence today?"
    DR: "Yep"
    PHB: "Same as yesterday?"
    DR: "Yep"
    PHB: "Still compiling is it?"

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