After TEN YEARS, effective immediately, I am resigning from Microsoft.
It’s been a hell of a ride and I’ve worked for some GREAT folks. 8 direct managers in 10 years. (I only choose 3 of them)
- Mike O’Neil (now at New Horizons) – I LOVED working for you. You are the best manager that I’ve ever had. You pushed me hard and I was proud of the work you drove me to achieve. I’d follow you into a burning building my friend. THANKS !
- Rick Green (now at Intel) – I’ll always be grateful to you for convincing me to come work for you instead of those other guys. It was a “wicked” year.
- Scott Guthrie, I loved following you and being a champion for the technologies that you led.
- Pete Brown, my current manager, you’re a great guy, an Honest Man, and I will always appreciate your efforts ! (We had some fun too !)
I worked for 1 of 2 other folks about whom I can only say “shame on you”.
Microsoft has changed so much (TOO much) in the past ten years.
I intend to blog more about why I (and so many others) am leaving Microsoft in the near future. It will be nice to have the freedom so say whatever I want in a blog without being censored and having my job threatened.
As I talked to companies about my next role I told each I had only three immutable criteria:
- I want to work for an organization that is LEADING innovation in its field and holds a brand that I can be truly proud to represent.
- I want to work in a role where I can really help people and have a positive measurable effect on the organization’s mission.
- I want to work with people I would hang out with even if no one were paying me to.
I feel think I hit the lottery !!!!
I have accepted an amazing position and will be starting MONDAY ! (Why wait.)
I’ll save the actual announcement for my next blog post but I’ll gibe you some hints.
- I’ll be exclusively working with Open Source Development Technologies.
- I won’t be running Windows on my daily use desktop.
- I won’t be wearing my Microsoft shirts at the event I’ll be speaking at.
- I’m selling my Windows Phone 7
- I’ll still be blogging at www.MisfitGeek.com
Any guesses ?
Congrats! Best wishes in your new endeavor. Are you going to Google?
All the best Joe!!!
Awesome for you, Joe!!!
Congrats on the new career move. I hope it makes you happy.
Congrats on the career move – you really seem excited about it, so good for you! That said, bummer about selling your WP7 – i’ve had all the phones, and its easily the best.
Feeling bad that you will work with Open Source Development Technologies. Anyway, best of luck.(Sun/Google)
Good luck Joe with your new adventure!
Congrats Joe!
I hope that even you left Microsoft you still share your knowledge by blogging and tweeting.
Congrats Joe on making the move. Will Brad Abrams be a coworker?
Looking forward to more of the details.
EVIL EMPIRE!!! Microsoft!!!! So you were evil solder!!!! However, congrats on your getting rid of evil empires kingdom.
That’s too bad Joe! I enjoyed your frankness blogs of Microsoft technology over the years. I’m sure where ever you “stumble upon”, they will greatly benefit.
I feel the same way about Microsoft. They have been complacent and too afraid to embrace ideas outside of the Microsoft Universe. The wait and see which way the wind blow and throw money at it strategy does not work in the long run. I believe it’s time to get the good old boys out and let young, fresh blood in to run the company.
Congrats and wishing you all the best! Can’t wait to hear more!
I’m sorry to see you go! I have enjoyed your blog and your podcasts. They’ve really helped me make sense of what’s going on with Microsoft technology. Even so, I look forward to seeing what you’re getting in to next!
Good for you. I was a permatemp contractor to Microsoft and then worked at Avanade (owned by Microsoft). I’m glad I’m outta there. I mean, back around 2001 I was noticing an amazing uptick of Linux in the server rooms in the USA, and also wanted to just go with the flow where all the cool innovation was going, and the cool guys weren’t using Microsoft. Plus, Microsoft’s penchant for not admitting bugs, or forcing people to pay for upgrades in order to fix bugs they should have fixed years ago, or the fact that Microsoft’s feature schedule moves too slow — these all irked me and it was time for me to move on.
Congrats and good luck Joe!
Amazon.
I hope you will still dip into .NET sometimes in the future.
Generally I think MS needs to change. Ballmer has bags of passion but is it shaping things in the right way? Passion can channel things in the right or wrong way.
Gates should go back and they should have a big shake up. Worked for Apple and Dell.
Glad you are finding more stable and exciting ground! Your passion and straight-forward knowledge and ways deserve to be used to their fullest. Hope you find all the happiness you seek!
Xamarin?
I’m envious. I use the .NET / MS stack but am working dilligently to just leave the entire set of tools. I’ve been doing Ruby on Rails + Node.js + HTML5 for a while now and really don’t find much reason to even contemplate using the MS stack for my dev anymore. There is just too much resistance and not enough positive left in that realm of the industry.
Congratz! Looking forward to your new role.
I’ll take a guess and say either Mozilla or Amazon.
Wish you full happyness in your new job
Good luck Joe. I enjoyed working with you years ago. Good to see you’ll find something that will be better suited for the place you’ve gotten to in the last few years. And FWIW I think you should be careful about using the word censorship in this context, as that certainly wasn’t what it was.
Thanks – but when you’re told to remove a post or you’re fired – that’s censorship !
Hey Joe,
I have been following you for years since Scott Hanselman had you on his podcast. And from what I remember, they hired you cause you didn’t fit in. Cause you were the “misfit geek”. So to see your post title, I wonder what really inspired this. As a poor student of human nature, I think you started out with a more bile filled blog post then toned it down but forgot to soften the title.
One of the things we enjoy about you is that are a none conformist in what you say or so you have said. Despite the fact that to this date even people like you STILL DO NOT KNOW exactly what you did for Microsoft, we feel you must have been really good at it to have been retained by the borg so long.
I am an open source evangelist at heart but I am also a very practical man. I too HATE the windows phone 7 with a passion and I still cry myself to sleep at times when I think of the metro theme on windows 8. But that does not mean I call Microsoft the the evil empire nor make Borg reference which are mostly veiled references at myself if I work there for TEN YEARS!!
I still follow you on twitter though I long since changed my handle. I wish you all the best in your new job and look forward to more of the links you share and the scattershot blogging we know and love you for.
Congrats on joining us MS alumni! With how dysfunctional the environment is at MS, I’m surprised how much talent continues to stick around. Good luck in your future endeavors!
All the best joe. once i have seen your blog related to asp.net and can’t resist my self to check daily your site for the new update.i love it how you represent things with videos as well.promise us that you are not going to stop blogging here for microsoft technologies.
Is it android related?
Didn’t you change your blog title this year? So it was cookin’ already?
Anyway, good luck at your new position, change is often a good thing.
// Ryan
Hey Joe, it has been my pleasure to work with you at Microsoft. I’m REALLY happy I met you and that we got to work together, even after I left the STO Ninjas. You’re a great guy with high standards and a great sense of commuity. I know you will completely kick ass in your next role.
Hopefully we’ll get a chance to hang out sometime in the future and I’ll be anxiously looking to see where you land. Best of luck and if I can help you in any way, you know you can always hit me up.
Rey…
hoping I’m not too late for the “poll”
I think you are going to Canonical (Ubuntu)
Joe – I had some good managers at Microsoft as well. Durell Leister and D.P. Brightful were two of the best ever. I had a stinker as well that was more interested in spreadsheets and getting the credit.
I left about 6 years ago, and even then many of us evangelists thought Ballmer’s tunnel-vision about Windows-windows-windows was wrong. We were shut down when we asked about a Microsoft fork of Linux – with many Windows services ported over. We were told there would not be Office on Linix. Later I saw reports on Courier that said that Ballmer refused to fund it because it wasn’t running Windows.
I still think there are great people at Microsoft, and great products. What’s lacking is vision – ever since Gates left and Ozzie was pushed out for correcting Ballmer (the perception here on the outside) in public about the brilliance of Apple’s iPad using their phone OS.
In any case, welcome to the ranks of ex-Microsoft
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[...] My last day at the evil empire – free from the borg collective ! (Joe Stagner) [...]
Please don’t stop blogging Joe, I visit your site daily and if you stopped I’ll suffer from intense withdrawal symptoms.
You made it!!! Can’t wait for the next round of tutorials and new learning. It’s time for my team to get off the Microsoft stack and you’ll be the guy to bring hordes of MS developers to open source. Your new employer should be very happy with their new hire. If you can put together even half of all the great tutorials you did for webforms and asp.net, you’ll be a star! Looking forward to continued greatness.
Damn (sigh). . .Another Troop down.
Semper Fi