Goodbye Microsoft, Pete has left the building

Amazing post by a guy (coincidentally also named Peter) whose work history closely mirrors mine. I worked for a consultancy and we were seriously hard core Linux people and passionate programmers, but then the money began to become more MS oriented and we acquired middle managers who knew nothing about code, and these same middle managers told us that our customers were demanding that we become MS certified. That was when I crawled into a hole and coded on the Mac until they finally completely lost the start-up spirit and demanded that I work 9 to 5 (I am sure they were under orders to come up with and enforce some silly corporate policy). They actually demanded that I stop putting in 60+ hour weeks (I was salary - no overtime). I decided to test the water and see if they meant it, showing up late for work (half hour once, and 45 minutes once). They threatened to write me up, and wanted me to sign papers affirming that I had been reprimanded for deviant behaviour. I told them instead that they were free to just close my 'personnel file', and walked out. I had taken all of my stuff (dozens of programming books) home the day before, and already cleared out my desk and computer hard drive of personall things, because I could feel the tension rising even then.

They company which I loved at first is now down from a height of around 26 while I worked there to 4 (plus 3 new people they have hired to fill the gaping holes left by attrition). This all happened in about a year's time. In another years time I have serious doubts about whether the company will still exist. Several of the passionate coders who worked there with me have gotten together and formed a startup where we do just as the other Pete is doing in his post. We write Ruby on Rails apps on Macs and Ubuntu, and host them on Ubuntu or Debian.

One main difference between the other Pete and I is that I have hated Microsoft for-e-ver. Started on Commodore in Basic, then to Macs. Solaris in College, with several (ridiculously) mandatory MS Visual Crap courses. Now in the workplace it's Red Hat EL4. At home a plethora (14 total) of Macs (which also run Windows for testing websites in IE!), Debian and Ubuntu machines. In my mind it is open source.