Omens

Comments

1. You sure it wasn’t ‘Nevermore, Nevermore’? Ravens and crows look a lot alike.

   Posted by Adiv on Feb. 01, 2008 at 8:20 AM [#]

2. Eeep. Well, maybe you can transition to being a ‘softie then?

   Maybe it’ll just be one of those gloomy days, like a Ronald Dhal book, and once the weekend hit all will be well.

   Posted by Dru on Feb. 01, 2008 at 8:58 AM [#]

3. Adiv — It could have been a raven, I sure as heck can’t tell them apart.

   Dru — I dunno. I asked my girlfriend, “So would you dump me if I became a Microsoft employee?” and without a pause she said, “Yes.”

   I think she was kidding.

   Posted by Evan on Feb. 01, 2008 at 9:25 AM [#]

4. So do you have any idea how this is going to affect you, man?

   Posted by Dave T. on Feb. 01, 2008 at 4:10 PM [#]

5. Are we talking job security or job satisfaction?

   Posted by Evan on Feb. 01, 2008 at 6:05 PM [#]

6. You might need to change your graphic in the blog header.

   Posted by Adiv on Feb. 03, 2008 at 1:28 PM [#]

7. Hey, people use Macs at Microsoft. There’s a whole Mac BU, in fact.

   Posted by Evan on Feb. 03, 2008 at 8:46 PM [#]

8. I’ve been a MicroSerf in the past, and it didn’t kill me.

   Posted by Auros on Feb. 04, 2008 at 12:00 AM [#]

9. Right. I know some current and former Microsoft employees — and they’re very sharp people, and many of them enjoy working there quite a bit.

   As for whether this particular acquisition will work out from an Engineering standpoint… well that, as we sometimes say in the valley, is an “open question”.

   (Imagine me making really really vigorous air quotes around “open question.”)

   Posted by Evan on Feb. 04, 2008 at 7:11 AM [#]

10. I was thinking more along the lines of Job Security.

    What the hell’s this Job Satisfaction you’re talking about?

    Posted by Dave T. on Feb. 04, 2008 at 4:02 PM [#]

11. Assuming the deal does in fact go through, I should be fine. I’m buried deep in the platform and infrastructure group. You can cut and merge various teams any way you like… but it will take a very long time to pry Yahoo! loose from its core infrastructure.

    Or… I could be wrong. Steve Ballmer could decide on Day One to just take off and nuke the site from orbit. But I suspect that scenario will play out about as well as it did in the movie.

    Posted by Evan on Feb. 04, 2008 at 8:17 PM [#]

12. Actually, I shouldn’t be so flip. If the infrastructure really is a dead end, I bet you could justify cutting writers a couple years before cutting engineers. :)

    Posted by Evan on Feb. 04, 2008 at 8:21 PM [#]

13. There were some articles discussing savings due to moving to “common platforms.” One assumes this means moving away from Open Source products such as Apache on FreeBSD servers and moving towards IIS on you-know-what. I’m sure you’re right that it will take a long time to pry Yahoo! loose, but it may be the goal.

    Not that this discussion is particularly over any line, but surely you know about dangers of blogging about work?

    Posted by Dinesh on Feb. 05, 2008 at 6:15 AM [#]

14. Yup, yup, common platforms. There has been a lot of yuk-yukking at work about this. “Oh sorry, I can’t make that meeting… I’ve got to go rewrite {Product X} in C#.” :) Anyway, I’m sure that would be their goal, but it would be a huge undertaking.

    Heh, I remember Dooce. I’m not too concerned about the dangers of work blogging… I don’t think there’s anything here that’s offensive or gives away deep dark corporate secrets. If I start posting stuff like this, then you should worry about me being fired, and rightly so.

    Posted by Evan on Feb. 05, 2008 at 6:36 AM [#]

15. I agree you are in a pretty safe zone with this blog. But the funny thing is, the Asian Database Administrator was her friend.

    Posted by Dinesh on Feb. 05, 2008 at 9:44 AM [#]