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News & ArtsWednesday, March 14, 2012
Tech Speaking of Impressive Resignation Letters...
Posted by David Schmader on Wed, Mar 14, 2012 at 3:24 PM
Hot on the heels of the Goldman-Sachs resignation letter that Paul slogged earlier comes another impressive resignation from a far more sympathetic source: James Whittaker, who left Microsoft to join Google in 2009, and now explains why he's left Google to rejoin Microsoft:
[A] warning in advance: there is no drama here, no tell-all, no former colleagues bashed and nothing more than you couldn’t already surmise from what’s happening in the press these days surrounding Google and its attitudes toward user privacy and software developers. This is simply a more personal telling...
The "punchline," as Whittaker calls it, comes in the third paragraph:
The Google I was passionate about was a technology company that empowered its employees to innovate. The Google I left was an advertising company with a single corporate-mandated focus.
Read the whole thing here. (Thank you, Metafilter.)
1
You are aware of this, I hope???
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2011/08/…
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2012/03/…
Darpa director Regina Dugan will soon be stepping down from her position atop the Pentagon’s premiere research shop to take a job with Google. Dugan, whose controversial tenure at the agency lasted just under three years, was “offered and accepted at senior executive position” with the internet giant, according to Darpa spokesman Eric Mazzacone. She felt she couldn’t say no to such an “innovative company,” he adds.
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2011/08/…
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2011/03/…
http://legaltimes.typepad.com/blt/2012/0…
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2011/08/…
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2012/03/…
Darpa director Regina Dugan will soon be stepping down from her position atop the Pentagon’s premiere research shop to take a job with Google. Dugan, whose controversial tenure at the agency lasted just under three years, was “offered and accepted at senior executive position” with the internet giant, according to Darpa spokesman Eric Mazzacone. She felt she couldn’t say no to such an “innovative company,” he adds.
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2011/08/…
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2011/03/…
http://legaltimes.typepad.com/blt/2012/0…
2
So does this mean that he reconsiders Microsoft to be "a technology company that empowered its employees to innovate. " Since when??
3
As a friend in my fb page said yesterday,"...I'm interested to see what he says about working at MSFT in 6 months."
8
I think it's funny that Paul posts an article a couple down from this one about a MS device that translates in near real-time, yet people still comment about MS not doing anything innovative.
9
The Google I was passionate about was a technology company that empowered its employees to innovate. The Google I left was an advertising company with a single corporate-mandated focus.
This is, is it not, the American business life cycle? A company is innovative or in some other way very cool and becomes successful. After that initial blast of success, the suits arrive. And after the suits arrive, it becomes just like every other corporate monolith concerned primarily not with what it makes but with the art of the deal because if there's one thing most people will tell you about working for corporations, they abhor originality unless that originality meets with success - starting the cycle all over again.
10
I am tired of being chased out of jobs due to the sickening nature of the corporate beast. I am an upper-management level employee who has quit his last 3 jobs in disgust after watching a cookie-cutter corporate machine strip my profession of everything I loved about it - right down to the same "purchased for $10,000s at a corporate seminar" training manual.
Innovation now is not only shunned "unless it is met with success", but shunned outright despite success because it undermines the value of the investment into "corporately-consistent" business products.
A generation of innovative, flexible, agile workers is being disenfranchised and disenheartened by a bunch of dusty stuffed shirts backed by vapid 40-something marketing majors who were weaned on antiquated 90's business strategy and have never spent a day in the trenches, from whence the real work, innovation, and product of a company comes.
Planet Earth, Rest in Fucking Peace.
Innovation now is not only shunned "unless it is met with success", but shunned outright despite success because it undermines the value of the investment into "corporately-consistent" business products.
A generation of innovative, flexible, agile workers is being disenfranchised and disenheartened by a bunch of dusty stuffed shirts backed by vapid 40-something marketing majors who were weaned on antiquated 90's business strategy and have never spent a day in the trenches, from whence the real work, innovation, and product of a company comes.
Planet Earth, Rest in Fucking Peace.
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