New Beginnings at Quire
bramski
So, a lot of people have been asking me, “What happened Bram? I heard you quit Microsoft?” My favorite comment of all, coming from Amy Matzke (go ahead, read my facebook profile). So, I guess I turned a few heads, I figured it would. Gossip travels quick, and thanks to everybody who continues to hound after me for information, I promise to get back to you all personally soon.
Microsoft: What was good
So, I never really found a lack for smart, hardworking, and good folks at Microsoft. There’s plenty of benefits and interesting work to be done. I have immense respect for the bitlocker team that I worked on in my team at Microsoft. They were a bunch of smart, arrogant, hard-working bastards, just the kind of folks I like to work with. Hell, the benefits are awesome, and they pay well. I think what I’m missing most right now about Microsoft though is the dlists, if you had an interest there was a dlist for it, with so much entertainment on a daily basis it was pretty unbelievable.
Microsoft: What was bad
Microsoft is big, big big. Working on windows you get to know just how tiny you really are in this place. I didn’t know half the people who worked on any of the components in that OS, it bothered me a fair bit, and it’s a major problem of working on software that large. Nobody can possibly understand everything that goes on in that OS, and management layers haven’t done a good job keeping that mess in check. There’s a lot of focus on individual excellence and your team, but very little in terms of looking at ways to improve windows on the whole.
Nothing made me feel more like a peon than when management put its foot down on my going away lunch two days before I was going to leave MS. It’s not the first time this year that nameless management has stomped on me. I got tired of it, I can’t work hard on something I don’t believe in.
In comes Quire
I’m going to have to thank Mark Egerman next time I see him for mentioning my name do David Steinberg, because it got me started down this whole crazy path. So Quire is, among all things, a privately funded startup company. The idea is to build an easy to use web service for online collaboration in Ruby on Rails. It’s enticing, there’s a clear market with a lot of people in it, and a whole lot of work to be done. I can’t much resist the idea of being one of the first people to dive headfirst onto this project, and I would’ve been stupid not to.
In the meantime, I’m working downtown, in the Bank of America building at the 41st floor (yah, seriously, somehow it works. I much moreso expected our tiny startup to be in some old burner room, or maybe an old aspestos factory). But, life is good never having to deal with a commute again.
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Posted on: Tuesday, August 22, 2006 at 7:10 am 
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