starrygaze
Active Member
- Joined
- Sep 27, 2005
- Messages
- 2,328
- Reaction score
- 3
I found his career ends from Microsoft. He is telling about Microsoft stinks. Guess who said Mac sucks I don't think anymore! It's past. Now Apple keeps better every tick! I found, "My Microsoft career is now officially over.
Microsoft don't innovate, in my opinion. Vista looks like a pile of crap compared to Mac OS X and Ubuntu with GLX."
Monday, September 11, 2006
Good bye Microsoft; Pete has now left the building!
In 1991, I installed Windows 3 on my desktop PC at work. Work at the time was indentured servitude at a construction company in my home town where they massively underpaid a naïve but talented guy (me) a measly 4 grand a year to write Progress applications and maintain Cobol stuff on an ageing mainframe. As I recall, I had more disk space, processor and memory on the Amiga in my bedroom at the time than the mainframe had.
When I installed Windows I was stunned. At last, PC's seemed capable of displaying a graphical user interface on a par with the Amiga's own Workbench. I was a young hacker who at the time used the somewhat embarrassing mantra of “Work for a living, live for Amiga”. My boss, a former accountant who happened to be in the right place at the right time when the construction company considered a mainframe, was not so impressed. I got an official warning for installing a 'game' on my work computer. I distinctly remember him bellowing at me that Windows was a “toy” and would never see the light of day in any workplace.
I didn't believe him of course, and quit as soon as my indentured servitude agreement allowed and went to work for Securicor writing more Progress apps, but in Windows. I pined for the days when I could write Windows applications full time, and that time soon arrived with the launch of Visual Basic 3. I formed my own company, wrote some books, and the rest is history.
I loved my job. I loved that I was paid to do my job. Programming back then was a voyage of discovery. At home, I'd hack code to make my Amigas do things not seen on Amigas before, and gasp as the demo crews of Central and Eastern Europe showed me how to really do it. As I got more into Windows programming and Visual Basic, my voyage continued. I eat, slept and breathed Windows code. I learned VB inside out. I read numerous editions of Petzold's book cover to cover and learned how to do what I could with VB first in C, then in C++ with MFC. Technology was advancing at a stunning pace and I was right there in the middle of it. Those were giddy days.
I dreamed of working at Microsoft. When Microsoft joined up with Accenture to form Avanade the word Consultant sounded so wonderfully romantic to me and I wondered if ever I'd make it there as one of the elite band of Avanade consultants, spreading the Microsoft message all over the world. I dreamed of systems that would change lives, help people, and do cool new things never seen before.
Somewhere along the way though, things changed. I don't know exactly when or how, but the world I loved got torn to shreds, set fire to, then mooshed into a pile of horse manure.
I found myself working with 'day coders', people with no passion, people that knew how to program and had learned how to do so simply because the money looked good. I found myself working with Project Managers with little or no experience of the field they were working in, habitually making appalling decisions day in and day out and kicking their teams of programmers when things went horribly wrong.
I did manage to join Avanade, and there I found myself surrounded by power hungry muppets, the odd idiot, a few downright liars (the practice director in particular being one of them), and only a smattering of the elite coders I dreamed I'd find there.
I moved from there to Edenbrook, a Microsoft centric consultancy and while on the whole the calibre and passion of people improved, the working conditions didn't. I got mismanaged into a nervous breakdown by one hapless moron and regularly found myself working alongside a guy who would proudly announce that he knew very little about anything but instead relied on his ability to 'blag' (lie, and deceive) to achieve his aims.
Consulting sucked, so I turned to full time roles. Everywhere I went looking for passion, talent and excitement I found myself surrounded only by politics that would make a Roman Senator shrivel in fear, and programmers whose only goal in life was to make it from pay check to pay check. Design patterns- what are they? Extreme Programming what? You mean you actually write 'tests' in code? What's a delegate? Why learn that version of the language – I don't even know this one too well!!
I did meet some great people, some very talented people, but I think off the top of my head the ratio was probably 1 in 40. Nayur Khan, a guy I met at Edenbrook can do stuff with .NET and Javascript that makes my head spin. Walter Vijaykumar is a web services god, but highly undervalued for no obvious reason that makes sense. I met authors like James Avery and Jason Bock, incredibly talented authors and coders that are great people to know.
I worked on some great projects too. At American Express 5 of us turned around a failed project into an outstanding success that to this day still makes that company a large sum of pure profit each and every day. At Enron, a small bunch of us designed a stunning trading system that never saw the light of day thanks to Ken Lay and his cronies screwing everything up.
But, by and large I found myself in the same situation over and over. I was like that female friend or relative that we all have that seems to continually find themselves in love with abusive partners. Over and over I'd be lambasted for being too passionate (a condition muppets refer to as arrogance). Time and again I'd find myself explaining basics of programming to people that should know better, people with years of experience under their belts, people that really didn't care. I've lost count of the number of times I've taken abuse (real and faux-comedic) for being dedicated to the pursuit of beauty in code and technology.
Outside of the day jobs I tried my best to be the best and to shine. I tried for MVP countless times but always got ignored. A couple of years back in fact Microsoft even appointed a bunch of people from Avanade and other companies that had done nothing more than sell projects with absolutely no community contribution to their name – they soon changed that situation when the deserving MVP's got upset.
I'm on Microsoft 'influencer' lists, email lists where Microsoft people try to get me to tow the company line and say great things about them and their products because it's perceived that I have an audience. The times that I've deviated from that line though I've found myself well and truly out in the cold. One particular 'evangelist' even went completely silent on me after I pulled out of a speaking engagement due to appendicitis. Nothing was said, but the sentiment was obvious.
On this very blog I announced InkuDoku, a Sudoku for Tablet PC. Soon after I did, Microsoft released the one they ship with UMPC for free, and a program manager actually emailed me with an offer of cash if I'd write an article merging my work with theirs, along with an apology for shooting my work in the head – purely accidentally of course.
So, for the past 3 years I've worked very hard at a very personal goal, and today I succeeded. I've aligned my spare time with technologies I want to use. I learned the stuff I thought was cool, whether the rest of the world did or not. I use Macintosh. I write Ruby on Rails, Python and Perl code and love it. Why? Because most of the other people out there doing the same thing have that same passionate that ignited in me a desire to be in this career in the first place.
So, today I resigned my job, and completely ended my Microsoft career. I have taken a role as Director with a company at the leading edge of the “Web 2.0” curve. My team and I will write Ruby on Rails code, use Macintosh computers to do so, shun Microsoft technology completely, go to work in shorts and sandals and blast each other with nerf guns. My team is devoted to being the best it can be, to learning, to improving, to pushing boundaries. And it's not Microsoft.
I'm writing this on my Mac using NeoOffice Writer while the PC under my desk is, for the last time ever, removing Windows and all the trappings that go with it to install Ubuntu Linux. My Microsoft career is now officially over.
Microsoft don't innovate, in my opinion. Vista looks like a pile of crap compared to Mac OS X and Ubuntu with GLX. Their software is buggy, overpriced, and stress inducing. Their development tools are staid, designed and developed by committees to solve every problem you could ever conceive of, while being ideally suited to solving none.
The people that write code for a living with Microsoft technologies (by and large -= not all, and if you're reading a blog about coding then you're probably not included in this generalization) are day coders. They code to pick up a pay check – they have no passion, no drive, little talent and create environments filled with tedium and political bullshit.
Today, I've resigned to leave that world behind forever, and I couldn't be happier.
Microsoft are the new IBM, and Microsoft customers are just like the huge corporate suit wearing monoliths that bought into the whole IBM mirage back in the 70's and 80's. I don't want to work for IBM. I just want to write cool software with talented passionate people, and make a difference in the world. I want to push the boundaries again like I did in the 80's and early 90's. I want to have fun and come home with a smile and a hug for my wife and kids instead of trudging through the door burdened with stress induced by boredom and corporate ineptitude.
Microsoft don't innovate, in my opinion. Vista looks like a pile of crap compared to Mac OS X and Ubuntu with GLX."
Monday, September 11, 2006
Good bye Microsoft; Pete has now left the building!
In 1991, I installed Windows 3 on my desktop PC at work. Work at the time was indentured servitude at a construction company in my home town where they massively underpaid a naïve but talented guy (me) a measly 4 grand a year to write Progress applications and maintain Cobol stuff on an ageing mainframe. As I recall, I had more disk space, processor and memory on the Amiga in my bedroom at the time than the mainframe had.
When I installed Windows I was stunned. At last, PC's seemed capable of displaying a graphical user interface on a par with the Amiga's own Workbench. I was a young hacker who at the time used the somewhat embarrassing mantra of “Work for a living, live for Amiga”. My boss, a former accountant who happened to be in the right place at the right time when the construction company considered a mainframe, was not so impressed. I got an official warning for installing a 'game' on my work computer. I distinctly remember him bellowing at me that Windows was a “toy” and would never see the light of day in any workplace.
I didn't believe him of course, and quit as soon as my indentured servitude agreement allowed and went to work for Securicor writing more Progress apps, but in Windows. I pined for the days when I could write Windows applications full time, and that time soon arrived with the launch of Visual Basic 3. I formed my own company, wrote some books, and the rest is history.
I loved my job. I loved that I was paid to do my job. Programming back then was a voyage of discovery. At home, I'd hack code to make my Amigas do things not seen on Amigas before, and gasp as the demo crews of Central and Eastern Europe showed me how to really do it. As I got more into Windows programming and Visual Basic, my voyage continued. I eat, slept and breathed Windows code. I learned VB inside out. I read numerous editions of Petzold's book cover to cover and learned how to do what I could with VB first in C, then in C++ with MFC. Technology was advancing at a stunning pace and I was right there in the middle of it. Those were giddy days.
I dreamed of working at Microsoft. When Microsoft joined up with Accenture to form Avanade the word Consultant sounded so wonderfully romantic to me and I wondered if ever I'd make it there as one of the elite band of Avanade consultants, spreading the Microsoft message all over the world. I dreamed of systems that would change lives, help people, and do cool new things never seen before.
Somewhere along the way though, things changed. I don't know exactly when or how, but the world I loved got torn to shreds, set fire to, then mooshed into a pile of horse manure.
I found myself working with 'day coders', people with no passion, people that knew how to program and had learned how to do so simply because the money looked good. I found myself working with Project Managers with little or no experience of the field they were working in, habitually making appalling decisions day in and day out and kicking their teams of programmers when things went horribly wrong.
I did manage to join Avanade, and there I found myself surrounded by power hungry muppets, the odd idiot, a few downright liars (the practice director in particular being one of them), and only a smattering of the elite coders I dreamed I'd find there.
I moved from there to Edenbrook, a Microsoft centric consultancy and while on the whole the calibre and passion of people improved, the working conditions didn't. I got mismanaged into a nervous breakdown by one hapless moron and regularly found myself working alongside a guy who would proudly announce that he knew very little about anything but instead relied on his ability to 'blag' (lie, and deceive) to achieve his aims.
Consulting sucked, so I turned to full time roles. Everywhere I went looking for passion, talent and excitement I found myself surrounded only by politics that would make a Roman Senator shrivel in fear, and programmers whose only goal in life was to make it from pay check to pay check. Design patterns- what are they? Extreme Programming what? You mean you actually write 'tests' in code? What's a delegate? Why learn that version of the language – I don't even know this one too well!!
I did meet some great people, some very talented people, but I think off the top of my head the ratio was probably 1 in 40. Nayur Khan, a guy I met at Edenbrook can do stuff with .NET and Javascript that makes my head spin. Walter Vijaykumar is a web services god, but highly undervalued for no obvious reason that makes sense. I met authors like James Avery and Jason Bock, incredibly talented authors and coders that are great people to know.
I worked on some great projects too. At American Express 5 of us turned around a failed project into an outstanding success that to this day still makes that company a large sum of pure profit each and every day. At Enron, a small bunch of us designed a stunning trading system that never saw the light of day thanks to Ken Lay and his cronies screwing everything up.
But, by and large I found myself in the same situation over and over. I was like that female friend or relative that we all have that seems to continually find themselves in love with abusive partners. Over and over I'd be lambasted for being too passionate (a condition muppets refer to as arrogance). Time and again I'd find myself explaining basics of programming to people that should know better, people with years of experience under their belts, people that really didn't care. I've lost count of the number of times I've taken abuse (real and faux-comedic) for being dedicated to the pursuit of beauty in code and technology.
Outside of the day jobs I tried my best to be the best and to shine. I tried for MVP countless times but always got ignored. A couple of years back in fact Microsoft even appointed a bunch of people from Avanade and other companies that had done nothing more than sell projects with absolutely no community contribution to their name – they soon changed that situation when the deserving MVP's got upset.
I'm on Microsoft 'influencer' lists, email lists where Microsoft people try to get me to tow the company line and say great things about them and their products because it's perceived that I have an audience. The times that I've deviated from that line though I've found myself well and truly out in the cold. One particular 'evangelist' even went completely silent on me after I pulled out of a speaking engagement due to appendicitis. Nothing was said, but the sentiment was obvious.
On this very blog I announced InkuDoku, a Sudoku for Tablet PC. Soon after I did, Microsoft released the one they ship with UMPC for free, and a program manager actually emailed me with an offer of cash if I'd write an article merging my work with theirs, along with an apology for shooting my work in the head – purely accidentally of course.
So, for the past 3 years I've worked very hard at a very personal goal, and today I succeeded. I've aligned my spare time with technologies I want to use. I learned the stuff I thought was cool, whether the rest of the world did or not. I use Macintosh. I write Ruby on Rails, Python and Perl code and love it. Why? Because most of the other people out there doing the same thing have that same passionate that ignited in me a desire to be in this career in the first place.
So, today I resigned my job, and completely ended my Microsoft career. I have taken a role as Director with a company at the leading edge of the “Web 2.0” curve. My team and I will write Ruby on Rails code, use Macintosh computers to do so, shun Microsoft technology completely, go to work in shorts and sandals and blast each other with nerf guns. My team is devoted to being the best it can be, to learning, to improving, to pushing boundaries. And it's not Microsoft.
I'm writing this on my Mac using NeoOffice Writer while the PC under my desk is, for the last time ever, removing Windows and all the trappings that go with it to install Ubuntu Linux. My Microsoft career is now officially over.
Microsoft don't innovate, in my opinion. Vista looks like a pile of crap compared to Mac OS X and Ubuntu with GLX. Their software is buggy, overpriced, and stress inducing. Their development tools are staid, designed and developed by committees to solve every problem you could ever conceive of, while being ideally suited to solving none.
The people that write code for a living with Microsoft technologies (by and large -= not all, and if you're reading a blog about coding then you're probably not included in this generalization) are day coders. They code to pick up a pay check – they have no passion, no drive, little talent and create environments filled with tedium and political bullshit.
Today, I've resigned to leave that world behind forever, and I couldn't be happier.
Microsoft are the new IBM, and Microsoft customers are just like the huge corporate suit wearing monoliths that bought into the whole IBM mirage back in the 70's and 80's. I don't want to work for IBM. I just want to write cool software with talented passionate people, and make a difference in the world. I want to push the boundaries again like I did in the 80's and early 90's. I want to have fun and come home with a smile and a hug for my wife and kids instead of trudging through the door burdened with stress induced by boredom and corporate ineptitude.
