For those of you who have been watching closely, for the last 2.5 months I’ve been seeking new employment here in the Puget Sound. I found my new employment, and settled a most amazing position with a brand new startup called Kiha. Yes, I agree, there’s little information about this company, but I’ll be working directly on a small team to start with some very amazing folks. Needless to say, I’m excited!

But, what of MyQuire? The buzz around the net has been pretty stagnant since the DEMO appearance. They won’t be totally for naught without me as their main developer, but I am saddened to leave the company whose technology I’d conceived and worked on from day 1. Leaving was clearly the right decision for me, but one always ponders what may have come had things gone a bit differently. I’ll miss a lot of the work we did and the great people that I worked with at MyQuire, but I really take it as a life lesson that was very rough at times, but exceedingly well learned!

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.