Imagine working for a company that is tolerated, at best, in many social circles. Imagine being a computer science graduate, going to a class reunion, telling people you work for Microsoft, and watching your former classmates slowly back away as if you’d just told them you had a venereal disease.
- Robin ‘Roblimo’ Miller on his recent Microsoft corporate junket.
The funny thing about this is that I cannot vouch for Roblimo’s assumptions about class reunions and working for the ‘Soft. In fact, I had the exact opposite experience. My former classmates thought it was incredibly cool that I was working for Microsoft. You hear about the blog echo chamber all the time; perhaps there’s an equivalent for people who are a little too plugged into the Linux community.
1 response so far ↓
1 Will Pearson // Dec 14, 2006 at 9:33 am
Being an MVP and someone considered to be quite close to the ‘Soft’ I’ve had both types of experience. Some people around here in the CS dept. where I work tended to back away at first, although the situations a bit better now that we don’t talk operating systems, but others thought it was really cool that I was an MVP and had links to the ‘Evil empire’. I think the deciding factor, as you infered, is whether people are really tied in to the *nix community. The people who tended to back away at first are real hardcore *nix fanatics; those who thought being an MVP was cool tended to be those who used Microsoft products and especially one of the departmental sys admins, as I gave him a bit of help sorting out a few problems.
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