Anyone who’s read this space will know that I give Microsoft a hard time on any number of fronts – cross-platform support for one, open source positioning (Matusow excepted) for another – but I’ve really gotta hand it to them: hiring, they get. Big time.
Yesterday I read with interest of Don Park Box trying to snag Richard Monson-Haefel, a 10 year Java veteran (Richard turned them down out of a desire to not move to Redmond). And then today I see the news that another long time Java guy, Matt Raible (whom you may remember from an earlier post of mine), just one day after discussing his career path, has accepted a job with the Visual Studio team as a developer/evangelist. Of particular interest is the focus that he’ll have with the VS team: Ajax (like it or not, folks, the term is here to stay).
These moves speak to Microsoft’s willingness to consider in its people what it often won’t surface in its products: cross platform experience. This is not a new trend for Microsoft; they’ve long been a vacuum for talented minds regardless of technical background, but I think it is an interesting counterpoint to the notion that Microsoft has trouble hiring.
Update: Forgot to acknowledge the possibility that this is all an April Fool’s joke 😉
Update 2: Richard just dropped me a note pointing out a rather egregious error on my part. It seems that some reading on a thread concerning Don Park and Atom bled over when I wrote this this morning, as Richard very politely pointed out to me. It was in fact Don Box (MS programming god whom I mentioned in passing here), not Park, who offered Richard the gig. Thanks for the correction, Richard.
Update 3: Hahaha, I got punk’d. Raible fooled me good, although in my defense it was good enough that it fooled lots of other folks as well, including News.com 😉 Anyhow, the point still stands; Raible might not be headed there, but Microsoft is very creative about their hiring. See some further illumination from Don Box on the subject here.
