cascadian telegrams: goodbye to all that

after ~11 years, 10 managers, 5 teams (and 3-4 different shipped products, depending on how you count), 3 patents, 2 continents and the birth of one son, I’m leaving Microsoft and moving onto other things. Here’s how I described to friends there:

Hello! And Goodbye…

My seven year-old son likes to say that he will work at the Lego Factory when he grows up.
Well, after nearly 11 years at Microsoft I’ve decided that I’m actually happier building things with Legos rather than designing Legos or deciding how many red vs white pieces are in each kit, whether Lego ships a Batman or Avatar kit, the philosophy of Legos and so forth, so I’m going back to building things. My last day at Microsoft is Friday April 9th 2010.

If you’re getting this mail, you are a friend and/or a colleague who has made my time at Microsoft a happy and fulfilling time. Thank you.

On balance, it really was a happy and fulfilling time. The last six months were not happy; my English side is not comfortable airing laundry like that in public, so I’ll leave it at that. Suffice to say that my current position was the impetus for leaving but not the reason… I’ve been talking about going for years. It wasn’t exactly how I envisioned leaving or when, but… the perfect time never arrives. So I left.

I must say the the prospect of being unemployed scares the life out of me in some ways. I’ve been unemployed precisely two weeks since 1987 (after we returned from our honeymoon in 1991, so… ages ago) which is effectively “never”. It is very weird.

I’ll stay in software and hopefully return to my original role as a developer (which I did for 13 years or so prior to becoming a ‘program manager’ at Microsoft). I thought that point was plain enough with the “lego” and “building” metaphor in the goodbye email, but I still got some replies like

""what’s this stuff about Lego?”

“what do you mean building… like, carpentry?”

“does this mean you have more time for hockey now?”

“are we still on for lunch?”

Mmm hmm. Glad to see that Microsoft continues to hire only the best and the brightest!

And of course the most popular response was: “what are you doing next?”

Honestly I don’t know yet. I’m going to write a few apps to blow the dust off of my coding skills, talk to as many smart people doing interesting things as I possibly can, and think about it for a little bit (if you know of interesting ideas, dear reader, my c.v. is here for context). It’s a big world outside of the echo chamber, and I have a lot to learn…

Here’s my new office, which also happens to be ‘home’: